Blog for Search Engine Optimization

I have always love learning and reading about web usability - it's amazing how certain ecommerce sites have increased their sales dramatically by adding a button or changing the number of screens to check out; so I am naturally stoked to be using a brand spanking new UI for Compendium today...and not to mention, it motivated me to post! :)

Why does the User Interface matter you ask?  Well, first back to the ecommerce example, the easier we can make things on our business blogging clients - the more they will blog.  So what changes did we make?  Mainly, basics - aligned icons more with Microsoft Word standards and some HTML clean up, to even further search engine optimize the blogs.  It's one of the beautiful parts of a Saas solution, like Compendium -- always improving our product!  

The latest release of Compendium Blogware that went live today included a big change that will benefit our content authors -- a new editing environment.

For the past year or so, we've been using the rich text editor supplied by the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) library.  It's pretty powerful, but it had enough weaknesses to motivate us to look for a replacement.

Last fall we looked at a short list of potential candidates and decided that the best match for our needs was an open source editor created by a team of developers led by Frederico Caldeira Knabben.  The editor's name bears the initials of Mr. Knabben -- FCKeditor.

For the most part content authors should find the interface very similar.  Most of the styling features are still there, but some of the toolbar buttons have changed icons.  Our support team has prepared some introductory material to ease the transition for existing customers.

Some of the things that users will find as welcome additions:

• cleaner HTML created by the editor
• availability of Undo and Redo operations
• support for keyboard shortcuts, making the editor feel more like a word processor than an HTML form

Some of the things we have improved with respect to our own editor customizations:

• oversize images are re-sized on the server upon upload so that they fit within the typical width of a blog column, making page load times much faster
• a keyword strength meter that doesn't slow down the editor on older systems and browsers

One thing that may jar long some time users is the change in the keyword strength meter itself.  Although the red-to-green gradient remains, no longer does the editor sport a numerical score. 

It was our experience that some users became too fixated on the score getting "stuck" at a certain value.  The meter's algorithm was designed to balance the desire to include keywords against the need to ensure that they weren't used excessively in a post.  When you blog for SEO, you have to keep these opposing goals in mind, lest your content look spammy in the eyes of search engines.

Rather than shooting for a "perfect score", an author should treat the meter as  qualitative barometer of whether he or she is performing this balancing act well on a corporate blog.  Moving from a number to a qualitative measure should help emphasize that.

For those marketers  involved in search marketing, we know that search is the one bright spot in the marketing landscape.  As you can see from the eMarketer forecast, search will continue to accelerate against other online advertising…and of course we all know that traditional non-online advertising is in a long and protracted decline.

Why is search winning?  Because it is the only mass marketing tool in history where you are responding to a prospects intent.   No longer do we have to analyze data and hope that certain segments might be interested in our offer. 

With Search, our prospects simply tell us when they have a need or problem they could use our help with.  Condo, Austin?   Variable Printing Services?  Chrome 4 slice toaster?  New Tires, Buffalo?  All of these and millions more indicate the needs and desires of the searcher.   Do you sell tires in Buffalo?

80% of all web interactions begin with searches.

So why, in a recent Microsoft adCenter survey, did 73% of the small business owners say they would rather DO THEIR TAXES than start a paid search marketing campaign.   

It’s not a lack of desire or a lack of intelligence, what most web folks fail to recognize about small business marketing is that they are constrained by both time and money.   This is what  makes and internet business blog such a compelling option.   

With a business blogging solution designed for business, they get two things.  The first is a managed solution.  One of the beauties of SaaS is help.  Unlike “free” blogging tools where you are completely on your own,  hosted business blogging tools have actual people that work to make their clients successful.  

At the end of the day, all the business needs to do is tell stories…as Sienfield’s Kramer says…talk about your day.  The more they talk, the more search traffic they drive.   Easy to use blogging software makes search marketing a LOT easier than doing taxes…. Blog for SEO...and win.

 

Then came the daunting task of marketing the service online. Bronson (a friend of Friedman's) helped him structure the Web site, and more importantly, taught him how to blog. In their opinions, building a blog is the key to a business being interactive with today's Internet buyer. Rather than a blog being a justification for a Web site, Friedman believes that a service-oriented Web venture should become a blog:

"Your regular Web site should be a blog Web site, and the 'normal' Web site pages are where you showcase your products and services as a display after they have read the messages about it from your blog.

1. Write compelling content.
2. Write it consistently.
3. Write it often.

• Make your content more about the customer than your company.
• Don't let your blog become a rolling press release.  Tell them something they're not going to read elsewhere.
• Use your blog to talk about the touchy issues your company faces so that they realize there are real people behind the brand.

"Enquisite is a web analytics company that focuses on search. They track search traffic to more than 5,000 sites, including SEOmoz (the rest of their client database is private), and record millions of search engine click referrals every day. From this information, they can see some amazing statistics, including:

For every 1 click on a paid search result, the organic results generate 8.5 clicks (this is on a keyword parity basis, not counting those search results that have no paid ads)"

Blogs started solely for SEO objectives will inevitably fail.

Bit by bit, posts look less and less like keyword optimized web pages and sink back to the familiar writing styles common to public relations and corporate marketing. Gone are the keywords that consumers are searching on. Gone is the traffic that used to come from search engines.

If SEO efforts persist, they can get sloppy without ongoing oversight either by an outsite SEO consultant or an internal blog champion (more about that in our next post). Keyword usage in blog posts can become disparate or worse, evolve into a keyword stuffing exercise.

Compendium's approach to corporate blogging helps you counteract this on several fronts.

1. Our product is multiuser blog software, which means that you can give your employees a stake in content creation through individual blogs.  Your most energetic employees can contribute, which keeps your content from falling into PR speak.
2. We recently introduced the ability for a customer to select a list of keywords to focus on.  This list appears prominently on the webpage where authors write their posts, making sure that they are aware of what topics your organization is trying to target. 
3. The author's content creation page has a list of links to recent news articles that are related to the focus keywords, which gives ample ideas for writing. As a matter of fact, I found Odden's article with the help of this suggestion feature.
4. Our Client Success team provides feedback to customers so that they have an idea of how their corporate blogging program is doing.  There are goals with measurable progress and advice on how to improve their corporate blogging strategy.
5. Our keyword strength meter algorithm throttles the score of a post that is excessively laden with keywords, which gently warns an author that his or her post might be too dense with keywords, thereby looking spammy.