6 Tips for Blogging in 2008

"... blogging is an excellent way to manage PR ..."

This is a nice piece on blogging with tips that we can all use. The key message that came across to me from this article was that you really need to pay attention to the small details of working your blog in order to get it to work most effectively for you.

For example, the author recommends hard coding keyword-rich links on the sidebar of your blog pointing to blog entries that are particularly important to your site. This kind of technique goes well beyond the concept of posting regularly to your blog to keep your content alive and fresh.

He also talks about writing keyword-rich titles for your entries, then, after posting them (and presumably, letting them get indexed?), returning to the entry and changing the titles to something that will be more eye-catching for readers. This reminds me of the difference between how newspaper headlines are written and how article titles or headlines need to be written for the web. Newspapers have had to adjust how their writers create headlines in order to make the stories findable on the Internet. I have even heard that search engines have made special adjustments to their search algorithms to accommodate newspapers' need for both kinds of headlines.

Overall, the message remains, the rewards go to those who pay attention to detail and have the persistence to apply good techniques to their work.

Make Your Blog Work Better!

"Google shows more recent results if a search query that wasn't popular before suddenly gets many searches. Google analyzes the search volume and the blog post volume to decide if a special search term or topic is hot or not."

A recent newsletter posting points to a way to make your blog perform better for your site. The key seems to be to stay aware of what is "hot" that might be relevant to your site, and make sure that you get a blog posted immediately. What this article says is that Google provides additional ranking emphasis for current blog entries for searches that suddenly take a jump in volume. What this means is that if there is a news item, for example, that attracts a lot of attention to a subject that is relevant to your business, it is to your advantage to put something up on your blog commenting on the event.

Suppose, for example, that you are selling coffee on the web. One day you see a news report saying that coffee has been determined to be good for your health in some way that was not realized previously (a story that was prominent recently). News stories like that attract a lot of attention to a topic for a short while, and you can anticipate that this will be reflected in search volume.

What you should do is to think about what people who hear about that story and want more information might search for, and post a blog immediately using those words to make some comment or observation about the story. You don't have to have anything earth-shattering to say about it, a simple article mentioning the story line and saying what you think about it will be sufficient. The point is to get something on-line immediately to take advantage of the boost that Google will give the topic for a short window of time.

If you are lucky and the story does attract attention, and if you have picked the right terms, you could get a huge boost for your blog in a very short period of time. This kind of short term volume increase for your site can also have a persistent, lingering effect on your rankings in searches over time.

As always, the advantage goes to those of us who stay on top of our field and are persistent in applying the right principles to our marketing eforts!