Blog for Search Optimization

More marketers are practicing organic search optimization

Friday, November 6, 2009 by Stephanie West

A recent article by Advertising Age titled, Digital Marketing: The State of Search Marketing: 2009, has reported that search marketing is continuing to grow. In addition, about 9 out of 10 marketers are practicing organic search optimization. That's a large percentage of marketers that are going organic to get found in search!

http://2medschool.blogspot.com/2007/10/organic-chemistry-alkyl-halides-part-ii.html

The benefits of leveraging your online marketing strategy by organic search are limitless. Since many people are clicking on organic search results, they are attracting viewers to their blog, which can, in turn, draw potential customers into their website.

If you want to acquire new customers and then convert those customers - corporate blogging might be your answer because blogging humanizes your marketing strategy.

Compendium's corporate blogging software is designed to help leverage your blog in organic search - with a humanized approach. Nine out of 10 marketers are trying to position themselves in organic search - which mean YOU (as the customer) are likely to come into contact with one of these marketer's organic search strategies.

For more information on blogging for organic search and how it pertains to you - click here to speak with a blogging expert. They will explain the benefits of using Compendium's blog software to you!

Applying more SG to business blogging

Friday, November 6, 2009 by Brian Millis

Ok, so I try not to do double Seth Godin references but he seems to be so timely for what I'm doing. His most recent blog post begins with this quote:

"The problem with "everyone" is that in order to reach everyone or teach everyone or sell to everyone, you need to so water down what you've got you end up with almost nothing."

This is what I find so hilarious about most of the corporate blogs I read. Often time these busy business men and women spend time manually tagging or categorizing their freeware blog for things like: social media, agency, advice, technology, etc. etc.

These are such general topics for organization. Most of these people tell me that they spend time blogging for SEO and do this organization so they will be found in the search engine by qualified prospects. If you are a branding agency, why would someone search just "branding" or "agency"?! They wouldn't. They would search something like "branding agency in charlotte".

Seth's advice is great to heed when thinking about corporate blogging. If you try and make your blog about EVERYTHING or appealing to EVERYONE . . . . almost NO ONE will find you. Or you could look at it this way: A company that creates one blog and fills it with info ranging from industry news to product information simply waters down the blog, trying to make it about EVERYTHING. This means it will not be found by ANYONE or be a useful vehicle for getting found in search and driving traffic.

And this is why Compendium's structure is brilliant. Blog about EVERYTHING and let the software take care of the organization that actually makes it relevant to the searcher and the search engine.

Common Mistakes in Blogging (#4)

Friday, November 6, 2009 by Sarah Sedberry

(4th in a series of 5)

Common Mistake #4:

The reason blogs are successful SEO tools is because they allow you to update them as frequently as you want. This is what the Search Engines love! They will send their web crawlers to your site looking for new content, and if they continue to find new content every time, they will come back more often and more frequently.

On the same hand, if the web crawler does not find new content, it will be trained to not come back as often or as frequently. Allowing your competition to surpass you.

Your business blog will not be very successful if the web crawlers aren't able to find new content. Make it discoverable and both the web crawlers and your readers/potential new customers will be able to find you.

Answer:

There are a few ways to make a blog more easily discovered by web crawlers, but the #1 way is to always be creating new content, and posting it frequently (on average a blog network should be generating at least 25 posts per month).

Other ways include:

Adding a link on your company home page to the blog.
Publicize the blog in newsletters, email signatures, and marketing collateral.
Integrate the blog with other social media, such as Facebook and Twitter.
Optimize content for search engines by always using at least one exact keyword phrase in your blog post and post title. (do not keyword stuff though - its spam!)

Common Mistake #1
Common Mistake #2
Common Mistake #3

Alerding Castor Hewitt receives results

Monday, November 2, 2009 by Stephanie West

This firm is a great example of why a business should blog. They dedicate about 2 hours a week to blogging. That's right: 2 HOURS PER WEEK. Wrap your head around that. In addition to their two hour per week blogging dedication, they have seen 500% blogging ROI... 500%!

Those numbers (alone) should convince you that corporate blogging has something great going for it. But if those numbers don't convince you, consider this additional information about Alerding Castor Hewitt.

This case study is an excellent reason of why you should blog for business. Compendium's blogging platform structures SEO tools that help maximize your search engine optimization results. Blogging for search, just as Alerding Castor Hewitt does, is a way for potential customers to find you on the internet. Online marketing is a means of reaching those potential customers that are searching for something on the internet. By blogging (for as little as 2 hours per week!), you are helping position your company to get found in search.

Click here to view this Alerding Castor Hewitt case study and read about their blogging success!

Blogging and Success

Friday, October 30, 2009 by Sarah Sedberry

In the Client Success department we are always monitoring how our clients are doing, and measuring their success. Every network that is set up with Compendium's powerful blogging software is set up with analytics that we are able to share with our customers in order to keep the ultimate goal in mind - return on investment/driving lead generation and sales.

We work hard to help show our clients the success of their blog program, but we are able to see even more results when our clients understand the marathon type success with a blog program.

When looking at our most successful clients we see a few characteristics that are involved with each program - does your blog program have the following?

Dedicated Program Owner- someone who is tied to the success of a program and will work with their bloggers to stay motivated
Tracking - the company has tracking in place in order to see the a visitor from the blog through to conversion

For more information on how to add our powerful blogging software to your marketing's SEO tools, schedule a demo today!

A Good Rule of Thumb For Content Creation

Friday, October 30, 2009 by Jess Wehner

Many clients wonder how much content it will take to start receiving traffic on their keywords - and the answer we most often tell them is you can never write enough! But the truth is, depending on the keywords you are targeting - it could take writing content to each of those keyword phrases as much as one time a day. When you decide to go after words organically, it takes a bit more work than targeting them via a pay per click campaign.

Using Compendium as your business blog software is only the first step in a great SEO strategy. Writing frequent, relevant content is the next step. I found a great post that gives one person's opinion on how much content you can actually expect to write: SEO Copywriting Frequency. Ian Lurie says to look at the competitiveness of the term, and then gives this scale for how much content you should be producing based on the number of competing pages showing up when you search for that term in Google:

<10,000 competing pages: Write once a week.
10,001-100,000 competing pages: Write twice a week.
100,001-200,000 competing pages: Write three times a week.
200,001-2,000,000 competing pages: Write every day.

Keep in mind, these theory applies to each keyword - so if you are targeting 100 keywords, you need to write a lot of content! (You can see why we just tell people to write as much as possible).

Fortunately, Compendium gives each of your posts the biggest bang for your buck, pulling each post out to several different pages based on the number of keywords you use. So instead of having to write 100 posts a day for 100 keywords, our software will take 1 post and put it towards 2-5 keywords (or however many you target). For more information on exactly how our software works, view a demo with one of our business development managers.

Indianapolis Gyms Need Blog Software... Part 2

Thursday, October 29, 2009 by Amber Mohling

In my previous post, I discussed my experiences of researching online to find possible gyms I could join in the Indianapolis area. My frustration came when I wasn't finding relevant search results, and I was able to determine that these gyms probably aren't using effective SEO tools to help market themselves online. My suggestion was that these gyms should use blog software.

Today, I continued my online research because I'm determined to find a gym with all the qualities I'm seeking out. After digging and digging online, I finally found a gym that really interests me. They even have a blog that discusses many of the qualities I'm looking for when google searching: Indianapolis personal trainer, sport fitness training in Indianapolis, etc. However, this gym was not present in the search engine results for any of these keyword phrases.

Compendium's blogging solution is different from all others out there and is helping our clients get found on numerous keywords related to their business... whether that be a gym, an ecommerce site, a brownie company, or anything inbetween.

Check out the Compendium website to learn more and request a demostration of our software today!

Tracking Newsletter Readers in Google Analytics

Thursday, October 29, 2009 by Kaila Woodside

A few weeks back the Client Success Team met up with a Google Analytics expert to learn more about what Google Analytics can do for our clients who are leveraging corporate blogging software. The more SEO tools and tracking ability a client has, the more they will know what their blog is doing for them. One feature really stood out to me during this session is the ability to tag links and track them throughout the analytics.

For example, lets say you are putting together a newsletter campaign. If you are leveraging email software, like ExactTarget, you are able to track open rates and click through rates through the software - but how do you track the reader after they have clicked through to your blog? With Google's URL builder you can do just

that.

A few easy steps to follow:
1.) Enter the URL of your blog site

2.) Fill in the fields:
- Campaign Source
- Campaign Medium
- Campaign Name
3.) Generate Code

4.) Use the generated hyperlink to send newsletter readers to your blog and track them through your analytics.

Tracking these readers:
Find your Direct Traffic. Within your direct traffic look, for your campaign source (IE: October Newsletter). Count of the conversions, read times, pages viewed/visit, etc to understand what these readers do after they leave your newsletter!

A blogging strategy is an important investment for clients, but if you don't know where all of your traffic is coming from and where its going... then you might not understand how powerful of a tool it really is.

Did You Know 4.0

Thursday, October 29, 2009 by Jenni Edwards

I have to share this video I ran across today while preparing for a presentation to college juniors & seniors next week in which I am talking about opportunities in technology.

Sometimes (in a very dorky way) I get so excited to be a part of the future and be working within this world we call "new media" at a blogging software company. This video (produced by The Economist) does a great job of highlighting the increased focused on online advertising (SEM, SEO, PPC, etc.) versus traditional media - the real take away I have here for businesses is that you must adapt your business model and your marketing to this new economy and new technologies --- the statistics are startling!

Enjoy!

Connect with Compendium

Thursday, October 29, 2009 by Meghan Manning

Would you like more opportunities to learn about Compendium and hear from our CEO/CoFounder Chris Baggott? If you said YES, then November is your month!

For the month of November, Compendium has been given the opportunity to showcase our product through a couple of different events. There are plenty of chances for you to hear about Compendium and to learn more about how we can help with your search marketing strategies.

Here are the Details:

November 5th: Online Marketing Connect: Next Generation Business Blogging: Be Found, Be Engaging. Get more details here.

November 19th: Target Marketing: Putting Your SEO on Steroids with Blogging. Register Now.

Welcome to Client Success Amber!

Thursday, October 29, 2009 by Allison Bowen

In my job at Compendium, I wear many hats. Not only have I recently begun hosting training webinars for our clients, I've also been offering some training to one of our very own!

Miss Amber Mohling has recently moved from her position in Lead Qualification to join us on the Client Success team. As even more businesses discover our powerful blogging software and our company grows, we have even more client questions and requests come in to our help@compendium.com e-mail on a daily basis. Hence why we brought Amber over to join our team!

Amber is going to be doing a job very similar to my own. She'll also be answering all of your questions about our blog software and fulfilling all client requests! This is a position that I really enjoy because no two days are ever the same. One day I'll be discussing SEO tools with clients and the next I'll be uploading new Calls-to-Action.

If you happen to call into our hotline (317-777-6255) or e-mail our help@compendium.com e-mail with a question or request and get Amber on the other end, be sure to welcome her to the team. She's done a great job learning the ropes so far and I'm looking forward to being able to help her learn even more. Who knows, I'm sure one of these days she'll be teaching me a thing or two!

You Don't Peak In High School

Monday, October 19, 2009 by Chris Baggott

Seth had a great post the other day talking about the goal of High School being basically to draw as much attention to yourself as possible.

The point being that most of the time this attention getting is short lived and without any real long term goal. As my wife says to our kids all the time: "You don't want to peak in High School!"

We see this a lot with the business people we talk to who are enamored with social networks without having any real goals. Like high school, the goal is to be popular with no other objective. This was perfectly manifested in the eMarketer story we talked about the other day. Their survey said that marketers had a goal of being Thought Leaders?

Seth's brilliance is that we have all seen this in our own lives. Popularity for the sake of popularity..."If I'm popular lots of good things will happen". Now some people are naturally going to be popular while most are going find themselves doing lots of compromising activity in a desperate attempt to be popular.....as you remember I'm sure, that popularity didn't last long and the memory is probably pretty bitter for all associated.

Then you have your ten or twenty year reunion and you find out who is really successful in life. Almost always, it's not the people who peaked in high school. The successful people are the ones who focused on the fundamentals and had a vision of the future.

How does this tie to Corporate Blogging? Widespread employee blogging is an investment in the future. The goal isn't popularity, followers or fans. The goal is to lay a foundation of stories about the problems you solve. That content will target search traffic. SEO is better for everyone...it's scalable, sustainable and puts you in front of people (prospects) who have problems you can solve. Corporate Blogging is real life, not high school.

The right tools for SEO...

Thursday, October 15, 2009 by Michael Burton

It doesn't take much, but there are a few important tools that any organization needs to possess before they can expect to experience strong SEO:

Simple Software: If you're looking for SEO, the place to start is the software. Compendium's easy to use software is the perfect tool needed to start the process of skyrocketing your organization up the Google rankings. It is powerful, affordable, and easy to use.

Bloggers: Your employees are the best bloggers you can have. Why? Because they are the experts on your products and services. Making blogging a priority in their day is important. You can do this by offering incentives and blogging contests.

Goals: Set goals for your bloggers... 2 to 3 posts a week on average is a good start, but remember- the more posts, the more effective the software.

Blogging for search is different than most blogs- You're blogging to get found! With the tools listed above, you should be on the right track to maximize SEO. If you are looking for more insights on how to maximize the use of Compendium's blog software, feel free to contact a Compendium team member today.

Using Search and My New Puppy

Tuesday, October 13, 2009 by Sarah Sedberry

Of course since I work at Compendium I am a tad biased towards the advantages of marketing through SEO, but let me give you a real life example and why any business out there should have a business blog program.

I have been on the look out for a puppy for quite a while. Not just any kind of puppy, a Shiba Inu - specifically a black/tan male. As most of you are already wondering what a Shiba Inu is, you can understand that its not a highly popular breed, and finding a reputable breeder was pretty difficult. However I was steadfast in my search and continued to scour the internet looking for breeders with litters coming up this year, etc.

*Marketers - notice the last sentence*

I knew exactly what I was looking for, I am a qualified buyer, all it takes is me (potential customer) to find you in order to buy.

Since I am not a Shiba Inu breeder insider, I utilized search engines to find the breeder I eventually connected with, and had the perfect little pup that I had been looking for. After handling the details, as of Saturday, I am a proud Shiba Inu owner and a customer that got exactly what I was looking for.

How are you reaching the potential customers that don't know you're out there, but know what they want and are ready to purchase? For more information on using a simple blogging platform like Compendium, schedule a demo today!

oh yeah - here's a picture of my little stud muffin!

(I'm a proud mama)

Partner in Blogging

Thursday, October 8, 2009 by Sarah Sedberry

When contemplating a simple blogging platform for your business, there are several points to consider. One of the major differences that Compendium Blogware provides (besides being built for SEO, driving traffic, and providing proven ROI) is our Client Success Team.

From the moment a business becomes a client with Compendium, we work with your team step by step to implement your blog network, provide training, and on going support through out the life of your contract.

This afternoon I had a meeting with a client to touch base and see how things were going with their blog strategy and provide recommendations.

At the end of our discussion she complimented Compendium for being a true partner and taking responsibility for providing support for our service. It is so useful for them to have someone there encouraging them to use the service versus just falling off once they sign the check. It helps them so much and she thanked us for our continued interest in their program.

This is may be one of the more valuable aspects of working with Compendium, that you truly have a partner in your blogging strategy versus having to navigate the waters of search engine optimization by yourself.

For more information to see if our business blogging platform is right for you, schedule a demo today.

Sustainable SEO

Wednesday, October 7, 2009 by P.J. Hinton

Being prominent in search results has a high value. You're convinced of that and are willing to fork over the big bucks to get there. There is no shortage of consultants who will be all too ready to take your money with the promise of quick results. The question you should be asking the consultant is, "Are the results you offer sustainable?" If you don't ask, you could be setting yourself up for a let down in the long run.

What determines whether a tactic is sustainable? Look at it from the search engine algorithm designer's standpoint. Whether someone continues to use your service depends on whether you can consistently deliver relevant results to the visitor. If you can't, or some other search engine can do a better job, your value as a service diminishes greatly. You can join the pile of search has-beens like Alta Vista and Lycos.

Google pours tons of effort into refining their algorithms to distinguish between good content and attempts to game the system. Chances are, if you are using tactics to game, you're going to get caught and get whacked. That quick bump to the top all of the sudden becomes a rapid slide to the bottom, and even if you clean up your act, it's a very long climb from the basement.

A very good case-in-point can be found in P.J. Fusco's SEO Q&A column from today. She takes on the "build or buy" question for inbound links to your website. She writes:

In one instance, a former client decided to start aggressively buying text links. The business quickly shot up the rankings, but then dropped abruptly when Google caught on to what it was doing. The company abandoned the tactic and eventually returned to its regular positioning...after the better part of a year. In the short term, it had what could be called success on the three terms for which they were buying links. But over the long term, it's hard to call the tactic successful.

If this is where your tactics ultimately land you, then you're not practicing sustainable SEO. She goes on to write:

Imagine where your site could be positioned in the search engines if you took the link-buying budget and developed a widget that helped build links to your site year after year. Or suppose you took that money and invested in creating content that repeatedly added valuable links to your site? Blogs remain a relatively inexpensive way to not only create link-worthy content, but connect with your customers in an entirely different voice.

That's pretty much what Compendium is all about... providing an application that companies can use to do sustainable SEO through blogging.

I would encourage you to read her entire column. It also contains some interesting information on the adoption and usefulness of the canonical link tag, which is something we introduced on new blog templates about seven months ago.

Get excited, it works!

Tuesday, October 6, 2009 by Lee Jorgenson

Everyone is selling something. I'm selling something, you're selling something, and the guy at the hot dog stand is selling something. While there is no shortage of products for sale, a lot of things just aren't worth buying.

We've all seen the overpromising health and diet products that don't do anything. How about the amazing infomercial products that fall apart in your hand the day after they arrive? As consumers, we get so battered with overpromises, that it's shocking to find something that is/does exactly what it says.

One of the best things about working at Compendium is that the Compendium blog software does exactly what it's supposed to. Just one month after coming on board, I signed a client in the financial email marketing industry. Two months after they started blogging for search, BizActions was on the first page of Google for 25 of the 50 keywords they were targeting with us. To date, they are showing up on hundreds of keyword searches, and their program is growing stronger by the day.

If you're in the market for an SEO tool, give us a call to hear about a product that does what it says. If you're still not convinced, download one of our case studies for further proof!

Talk to you soon!

Compendium Blogware . . . Clean, Fast, and Relevant

Tuesday, October 6, 2009 by Brian Millis

I just read this great article from Businessweek Online. It has an interview with Google's Matt Cutts. In one question about comparing the benefits of Google to Yahoo and Microsoft (related to the development of Bing), Matt makes a great point that touches on the value of the Compendium business blog software.

Cutts says:

"Those are three key things: freshness; comprehensiveness (you want to crawl as much of the Web as possible); and relevance (core ranking and Web spam). And you want the user experience to be really clean. If you go to senior citizens and ask, “What do you like about Google?” they’ll say “Clean, fast, and relevant.”

Let's work backwards on Matt's list because this is exactly why businesses should consider our blogging solution. We create the most relevant blog pages for our clients most important targeted search phrases. Relevant . . . . .Check!

Google and other search engines can crawl this content faster than other blogs because it's not buried in some huge blog with tons of category pages and tags or on some giant web site. We also make the entire user experience fast by automating the SEO of our clients' blog content. Fast . . . . . . Check!

A clean user experience is our top priority for us. When a user searches a topic or problem, we want our clients' blogs to be entirely focused around that query. Give them that relevant of a blog page and they will be happy and convert on a call to action. Making the search engine happy makes the searcher happy. Compendium Blogware makes both happy! Clean . . . . . . Check, Check!

A Blogging Solution as an SEO Tool

Tuesday, October 6, 2009 by Angela Castelli

Are you currently blogging as a search marketing strategy for your business? Or, do you have maybe 5-6 different blog pages at an attempt to blog as an SEO tool? If so, what type of results are you seeing with this strategy?

The reason I ask is because I speak with many companies each day who are blogging for their businesses as a way to increase their inbound traffic organically online, but they aren't using the best blogging software that's available, so they aren't getting the best results that are available.

Are you using a specific corporate blogging software designed to help drive your blogs high in organic search results? If you aren't working with Compendium, then you are using blogging platforms and tools designed more specifically for first and second generation blogging (citizen journalism, and to create community). In order for you to maximize the results you are wanting to see, you need to be using the best tool designed to help you blog for search engine optimization. If you are looking to do any of the following:

Increase inbound organic traffic
Be found in search for more keywords than you are currently found for
Convert the new traffic into inbound leads
See a return on your blogging investment

Then please request to see a demo to learn more about how we can help you achieve your online marketing goals, and show you how to use the best blogging and SEO tools, to achieve the best results.