Having a corporate blog is almost a must these days. According to Jupiter Research, in 2006, statistics showed that 34% of large corporate companies had established weblogs. Another 35% planned to do so by the end of 2006, thus bringing the total to nearly 70%.


Having a corporate blog is almost a must these days. According to Jupiter Research, in 2006, statistics showed that 34% of large corporate companies had established weblogs. Another 35% planned to do so by the end of 2006, thus bringing the total to nearly 70%.

So what is a corporate blog? Corporate blogs can be internal or external. An internal blog, which is typically used through the corporations Intranet for employees, is a way to help employees participate in ideas, discuss issues, stimulate communication throughout the company’s divisions and is meant to create a feel of community within the corporation.

The external blog is available for anybody to read and often reflects the company’s values and its spokespersons views. The blog can be a way to announce new products and services (or the end of old products), to explain and clarify policies, or to react on public criticism on certain issues. It also allows a window to the company culture and is often treated more informally than traditional press releases, though a corporate blog often tries to accomplish similar goals as press releases do. In some corporate blogs, all posts go through a review before they're posted. Some corporate blogs, but not all, allow comments to be made to the posts.

With that said, what are some basic rules about creating and maintaining corporate blogs? Here are the top ten:

1. Don’t Use Your Blog Primarily For Marketing – People won’t want to read your blog if it is just a bunch of advertising and marketing. A blog should reveal the real meat of your company, an insider view. The more personal you can make your corporate blog the better. As with all blogs, there should be a level of personality, sincerity and sense of respect for the community that is best kept real.

2. Have The Backing of The CEO – Blogging can reveal a lot of information, therefore you want to make sure your CEO is behind it all the way. Before starting your corporate blog, make sure you have explained to the CEO the benefits and risks. You may also want to check with your legal department on what can and can’t be said. Know your parameters.

3. Who Will Write The Blog – This is important and it depends on if the blog is internal or external. Because each blog serves its own purpose, you want the right people for the job. This may require training for those you choose. You may choose numerous people who you feel represent your company well, but these people also need to be trained in how to write blogs, how to convey their message, how to inspire others and more. Your bloggers should understand how blogs work, what blog etiquette is or how to deal with blog basics. There is also the concern of your bloggers dealing with intellectual property rights and information leaks. But don’t be afraid, a little training will go a long way.

4. Keep It Authentic – As mentioned before, the blog is not another source for marketing and advertising. You want to connect with your readers in a real way. This isn’t to say your blogs shouldn’t be in alignment with your company’s brand, mission and objectives, this is important too. But allow room for the bloggers true voice to come through.

5. Assign Subjects - Assign a person to oversee all blogs, somebody who has an overall knowledge of company policies and public relations. Assign bloggers according to the expertise in their field. These writers should then have to submit their work to the one person who oversees all of the blogs for review before posting. This checks and balance system will save your company a lot of headaches, just in case a blogger gets carried away and says something that could harm the company. Work with each blogger to develop an editorial calendar that keeps him or her on track and aligns with company events, releases, industry happenings, etc.

6. Throw It Out There - Don’t hide from the tough stuff. Be willing to admit mistakes.
The blogosphere expects that when a company joins the blogosphere, they should be honest about shortcomings, failings and issues. Members of the blogosphere are also willing to forgive companies when they admit their mistakes.

7. Use Your Blog For Company Crisis – Every company has times when they receive a big black mark due to some error or PR disaster. You can use your blog to help your company work through this. Create a plan ahead of time regarding how your blog will address such potential company issues.

8. Moderate blog comments. – People like to comment on blogs and some take their aggressions out on the blog due to its anonymity. This is why it is important to moderate comments continually.

9. Use Your Internal Blog To Improve Communications – If you find your corporation doesn’t communicate well across departments, a blog can assist you in bridging this divide. When you place a representative from departments in a position of blogging for their department, information gets shared and can help the company see the bigger picture.

10. Create Objectives – Your blog should have some sort of device for measuring its effectiveness before starting it. Design criteria that you will want as a measuring device, this criteria can include: Positive media mentions, Traffic to the blog, Incoming links to the blog, Increases in brand awareness, Increased attendance at company events.

Having a corporate blog doesn’t have to be complicated and scary, especially if you apply some of the basic rules ahead of time. In the end, you might find it an easy way to help your company.

There are millions of blogs online these days and with those blogs are people finding ways to improve their website’s search engine rankings. Yes, blogs have more than one purpose.

Sure they are informative and have lots of fresh content, but they also link back to corporate or business websites, which in turn helps those websites move up the search engine rankings scale.

So why are blogs so successful in increasing your website’s rankings? To start, blogs have no specific special powers of high rankings on their very own. What they do have potentially is fresh, unique content. Most search engines tend to like this, regardless of the format. If the search engines know any given site is adding new articles on a frequent basis, they will come around often to index it and indexing in turn means better ratings.

This leads us to making sure your site’s content is fresh and how to draw people to that content. Good content is probably the best thing you can do to draw attention to your blog and maintain a following. To do this, try covering topics that nobody else is talking about. By writing about niche subjects, you can grab traffic that is looking for what you have to say. Second, spend the time and effort to research and write about your subject, don’t just repeat what everybody else is talking about.

Another strategy in creating a successful blog includes the writing of quality title tags with two audiences in mind. First and foremost, you're writing a title tag for the people who will visit your site or have a subscription to your feed. You also want to think about search engines when you title your posts, since the engines can help to drive traffic to your blog. Once you have finished your title tags, now you will want to make sure all of your entries are tagged. Technorati is the first place that you should be tagging posts. Tagging content can also be valuable to help give you a "bump" towards getting traffic from big sites like Reddit, Digg & StumbleUpon.

Tagging posts is one method if getting your content out in front of your potential audience, another way is through Twitter. Although Twitter is a social media tool meant to create community and relationships, it does have an SEO value. For example, Twitter can affect positively your Alexa rankings by sending visitors to your pages. Usage data is a sign of quality for Google and all the other search engines. If you can make people come to your site via Twitter, then this is an SEO advantage you cannot afford to miss. When using Twitter, don’t worry about shortening your URL’s, the link will still have value. These TinyURLs are dynamically created URLs that redirect users to the real URL via 301 (permanent redirect). Search engines do not index TinyURLs, but index and pass PageRank to the actual URLs instead.

While we are talking about the backend, make sure you are pinging your articles each time you write them. An easy way for search engines to quickly find your new content is through the process of pinging. Using a tool like Pingomatic is very helpful in this process. Pinging seems to help get blog posts spidered and indexed very quickly.

Last, add social book marking links to the end of each blog entry. This helps your reader pick your article and add it to their favorite book marking software and simultaneously promotes your site. Having your blog’s articles submitted to book marking sites such as Delicious helps you also build links back to your blog. Backlinks are important because each time someone links to your site it counts sort of as a “vote” for it, moving it higher up in the search engine results pages.

These are just a few ways your blog can grow and along with it your website’s rankings. With a little time and some patience, before long your site will surely make its way to the top.

Pamela Ravenwood is a copywriter for ArteWorks SEO. She is an award winning writer, journalist, SEO specialist and strategic planning consultant. To learn more about this search engine optimization company, visit www.arteworks.biz.

Sometimes it is the little things that make the biggest impression. This could be said for page titles.
A page title is the code behind your individual website’s pages that helps search engines identify it.

Do individual’s see page titles or just programmers? The answer is both. If you type in a website’s address such as www.arteworks.com you will notice in the tab is an identifier, this particular website’s reads “Search Engine Optimization Company SEO Companies | ArteWorks SEO Austin”. This is helpful for people who open many tabs or bookmark.

On the backend of your website, within the code, your title tag will be enclosed with brackets and labeled title.

Because page titles are seen by both your audience and search engines, lets look at the benefits of both.

Audience

1. One of the best ways to attract repeat visits is to have someone bookmark your web page and because page titles are the default label for your browser bookmarks, it makes it easier for your reader to find you again. If your page title is not descriptive or missing, most people will not remember why they bookmarked your site in the first place.
2. Page titles are stored in browser history lists. Similar to bookmarks, browsers by default use page titles to label pages in the browser’s history. If your audience wanted to find your page again in their History, they would not find it easily if your page has a non-descriptive title.
3. Page titles show up in some search engines as descriptors of your website. If you want someone to click on your website among the millions of other choices they have then you must write a very informative and concise title. Many people start with the name of their business followed by a descriptor, others start with keywords followed by a call to action. People should know instantly what they will be clicking to the moment they choose your site, therefore don’t stuff your title with keywords and unnecessary information. Be honest with your reader while seducing them into your site.

Search Engines

1. Naturally, search engines rank pages with relevant titles higher than web pages without relevant titles. The basic idea is that you are helping the search engine understand your web page through the page title.
2. Unique titles to match each of your website’s pages helps search engines clarify who and what you are. To understand this, let’s look at how the search engine works. Spiders crawl the web and grab as much content (including links) from every web site they can find. This process is infinite and the spider just keeps sending content back to the search engine servers for processing. The algorithm then sorts through all the content that is sent by the spider and has to determine what is on each page, what the content is about, and how relevant that page is to each search that is conducted at the search engine. The task is then to make this process as simple as possible, by helping the algorithm see the differences between each page. When the spider reads your descriptions and titles and finds that they’re the same, it is too difficult for it differentiate amongst your pages, and is less likely to return that page in the search results. So you need to be able to show the spiders that each page is unique, not only with unique content, but by also adding unique page descriptions and titles.
3. RSS generators and content management systems use page titles to create headlines; again this is important for search engines to recognize.
4. Almost half of all the badly ranking sites found in many of the major search engines do not specifically identify the homepage in the page title. Most websites simply included the company name in the title, making it impossible for a user to know exactly what particular webpage a bookmark or search result relates to.

Writing a quality title page for each individual page on your website may seem like a lot of work but when you evaluate the pros and cons, you will discover it is certainly worth the time.

About the Author: Pamela Ravenwood is a copywriter for ArteWorks SEO. She is an award winning writer, journalist, SEO specialist and strategic planning consultant. To learn more about this search engine optimization company, visit www.arteworks.biz.

If you are a new blogger or even an experienced one, it is important to check in with how your blog is doing and maintain it in a way that successful bloggers do. So what is it successful bloggers do? Here is your blogger checklist, which consists of eight items for you to consider.


If you are a new blogger or even an experienced one, it is important to check in with how your blog is doing and maintain it in a way that successful bloggers do. So what is it successful bloggers do? Here is your blogger checklist, which consists of eight items for you to consider.

1. Proofread Your Work - Misspellings and wrong use of words in a blog entry can turn a reader off in a real hurry. Make sure you type your original blog message in a program that contains spell check and then reread your work for errors. You can then copy and paste your work into your blog.

2. Publish Posts on a Regular Basis - If you want to maintain a following of readers and prove you are serious about your blog you have to keep your content fresh and updated. You may not have time to blog daily so the important thing is to just be consistent. Commit to how often you will make an entry, it may be weekly, biweekly or monthly. When you are consistent, your guests will know when to check back in with you.

3. Backup Your Blog - There is nothing worse than losing all of your work, especially if your blog contains numerous entries. Create an automatic backup system for your blog. Most blogging software companies have a Help file to assist you in understanding how to back your blog up or what processes are needed.

4. Link to Older Posts - If you have been blogging for a while, it is most likely that many of your topics will overlap, so why not provide your reader with reference to some of your older entries. This can be done with a link. When you do this, you are building an effective linking strategy and encouraging readers to stay on your blog longer. As we all know, a quality linking strategy can mean an increase your traffic and search engine rankings.

5. Answer Guests Comments - Take the time to answer anyone who makes a comment on your blog. Doing this will create loyalty among your followers and will help build community. If there comes a day when your blog is extremely popular, it is still important to maintain correspondence with your readers. Also, be kind and considerate when responding to your readers. A topic that may be obvious to you may not be to your reader and there is no need to make somebody feel bad.

6. Approve Comments - If you use comment moderation (and you should unless you get very low volumes of spam) you should approve pending comments on a regular basis. Having meaningful comments on your blog is important, so check pending comments regularly to make sure they are getting posted.

7. Remember Your Audience When Creating Topics – If you have a new blog, one of most overlooked items is being able to accurately define the audience that you will be writing to. As time goes by, you’ll learn what types of content your readers appreciate or don’t appreciate in that you will have little response. Sometimes creating a niche that very few people write about or understand is a great way to get your blog going and you will know exactly who your audience is.

8. Check for Dead Links – There is nothing more annoying than clicking on a dead link. If you’re like most bloggers you probably include a lot of links in your posts, both inbound and outbound. Those links may have worked at the time the post was published, but do you know if they still work? Dead links are especially common with outbound links. The blogs and websites you link to may shut down, changes their link structure, or remove a page, all of which will result in dead links. So make a date on a regular basis to check all outbound links on your blog.

Follow these eight simple rules and your blog’s maintenance will continue to grow successful.




About the Author: Pamela Ravenwood is a copywriter for ArteWorks SEO. She is an award winning writer, journalist, SEO specialist and strategic planning consultant. To learn more about this search engine optimization company, visit www.arteworks.biz.

For years it has been thought that Google is using word relationship technologies, one of which has been dubbed “latent semantic indexing,” or LSI, and when you think about it, this concept is really something out of a Sci-Fi movie. Not only does Google index certain words that appear in a document, but it examines the document collection as a whole, comparing it to other documents in order to determine which documents contain similar word choice. The really amazing thing is how well it correlates these semantically similar pages in a way that is strikingly close to the way a human would classify the same information.

We recently discovered an excellent example of this that almost makes it seem like an actual human being made changes to a search result because of the relevancy of the result. We did a search for “gag me with a spoon.” We all remember that phrase right? Well, some of the younger folk these days have no idea what it means, so a simple Google search is the logical solution. As it appears below, the sixth result for this query is a Wikipedia entry about “Valspeak.”



It just so happens that Valspeak is the term used to describe the kind of speech, or sociolect, associated with the phrase, “gag me with a spoon.” In other words, it is the language of “valley girls.” So that doesn’t seem so uncommon so far because you might think there are some examples of Valspeak, of which one would be “gag me with a spoon.” But the amazing thing is that this phrase does not appear even once on the entire page. Scour it as much as you like, but the phrase we queried is nowhere to be found. This is simply an excellent example of latent semantic indexing in which Google has taken terms that do appear, such as “valley girls,” “surfer slang,” “Southern California,” or even “Clueless,” and compared it to pages containing the phrase “gag me with a spoon.” As you might guess, there are probably a large number of commonalities with these pages, and thus, Google succeeds in placing a search result that is actually quite relevant to the query but that does not even contain that term.

So what does this mean for search marketers? Anyone can easily do a search to find the terms that Google considers relevant to certain keyphrases. Simply do a search for ~search marketing. The ~ character causes semantically related terms to appear in bold in the search results so that terms like online marketing and Internet marketing appear. It might be a good idea to include some of this terminology along with target keyphrases in order to take full advantage of latent semantic indexing and increase the relevancy of your pages.


About the Author: Peter Hamilton is the Project Manager in charge of the Seattle office of ArteWorks SEO. His interest and experience in search engine optimization is largely focused on social media optimization and multi-media facets of exposure specifically video SEO. To learn more about this search engine optimization company, visit www.arteworks.biz.

So you’ve secured some first rate rankings for some of your target keyphrases and you are looking to expand that traffic. Well, there are about a hundred ways to do this, but one of the most simple solutions that many people neglect is modifying your keyphrases to include some long tail. What’s long tail? Well, long tail keyphrases are considered those that are three or more words that may not have a huge amount of traffic, but that traffic sure is relevant and valuable, which is why utilizing this method can really make a difference your search engine referrals.

First you will need to start with some keyphrase research to find out what phrases are going to be the most relevant while also producing a reasonable amount of traffic. Now, the key to this is that these keyphrases should also include the phrases for which your site already ranks. For example, if your website ranks will for “dallas real estate” (which would be quite fortunate for you), you might start looking at phrases like “dallas real estate for sale” or “dallas real estate investment.” Though these only show approximately 1360 searches per month combined, they are more relevant and less competitive. The odds of securing rankings for these phrases with your highly ranked pages are quite good.

So once you’ve picked out these phrases, what now? Well, you don’t have to stick them in everywhere, modifying your title tag and every reference to the already ranking phrase. In fact I would not recommend this. However, using this long tail phrase in an Hx tag or two as well as in regular text and maybe even an alternate image attribute can be very effective.

Of course, the work doesn’t stop with these on-page content/code modifications. Now you need to get some great anchortext links using these new long tail phrases. I will leave it up to you how you decide to accomplish this. The long and short of it is that many companies are missing out on some great traffic they could be snagging from work they have already completed. Long tail modifiers utilize the page rank and relevancy of a page you have already worked hard to achieve high search engine visibility, so why not utilize it as much as possible? So get started on that research. It is well worth the investment.

About the Author: Peter Hamilton is the Project Manager in charge of the Seattle office of ArteWorks SEO. His interest and experience in search engine optimization is largely focused on social media optimization and multi-media facets of exposure specifically video SEO. To learn more about this search engine optimization company, visit www.arteworks.biz.

Though it appears they have been testing this for some time, the search bar appearing in actual search results is a new one for me. A friend of mine saw them when doing a search for various photo sites and brought it to my attention. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Do a search for the query “Wikipedia.”



As you see, in the top listing for the main Wikipedia website, a search bar is included below the other site navigation results. As you conduct more searches, you will see that it seems a little odd that some major websites have the search box feature while others don’t. What do you suppose is the criteria for this? Are the sites that have a search bar in their name results hand picked by somebody behind the Google gates? Some notable searches that render a search bar in the top results are:

“imdb” “microsoft” “flickr” “youtube”

Then there are a few searches that surprisingly do not get a search bar in the top listing such as:

“film critic” “apple” “picasa” “google video”

Okay, fine, so some get the search bar and some don’t, but do you see any similarities between these two lists? I intentionally chose searches that would retrieve very similar results for companies that are very similar in size and nature. Is this just some addition to the sitemap that I do not know about? Perhaps some of you can shed some light on this for me?

Regardless, I think it is pretty slick. When you type in a search and proceed, the search engine provides a healthy list of results within that particular website that match your query. What might be even more interesting is to learn a little more about what that search algorithm looks like. What makes one reference to a keyphrase more relevant than another within the same website? I’m pretty sure it is not based on page rank, or maybe it is? And does this mean anything for those working on search engine optimizaiton for these major players?

Thoughts?


About the Author: Peter Hamilton is the Project Manager in charge of the Seattle office of ArteWorks SEO. His interest and experience in search engine optimization is largely focused on social media optimization and multi-media facets of exposure specifically video SEO. To learn more about this search engine optimization company, visit www.arteworks.biz.

Many SEO’s have been kicking and screaming against really using video as a legitimate source of content and link bait. The fact of the matter is that video is quickly becoming the most accessible and viewed type of content online, meaning Internet marketers should be hopping on this and fast. I suppose the largest barrier is that most SEO’s have very little if any experience in video production or formatting for the web. So for many, the task may seem daunting. Whatever the reason, now is a better time than ever to really make an investment in this steadily growing market.

Take for example this recent Google trends graph “search engine optimization” queries.



This may unsettle a few in the industry, showing a decline in the desire for SEO services over all, but I don’t believe this to be the case at all. I believe businesses and marketers are becoming more and more savvy with SEO and are now looking for more specific facets. Why do I think this? Let’s take a look at the trend of queries for “video seo” related keywords.



Hmmm. This looks pretty exciting for SEOs looking to expand their video production departments and affiliates. Of course the numbers are still not at the level that “search engine optimization” queries are, but according to the trend, it won’t take long. Matt Foster, CEO of ArteWorks SEO, predicts that we will see all of the major online players “jumping on this bandwagon over the next 18+ months.” Coming from someone who has watched the SEO trends for the last 10 years under a microscope, I would take this statement seriously. There is going to be a major shift.

If you are not involved in video or some of the other more specialized SEO strategies in the future, you will be left in the dust. Search ranking competition continues to increase as the status quo continues to rise, and at the same time, online video viewership is increasing at an alarming rate. Video is the new SEO copy, and as always, the better the content, the more links juice it will create, so everyone should be prepared to get their feet wet if they are not already pursuing this.

More Information on Video SEO

Major media companies, retailers, corporations, and even Presidential campaigns have realized the power of online video. It is the most likely type of content to go viral on a major scale, and it is becoming one of the most likely to receive link love. This is the way the trend is going, but don’t take my word for it. Do the research. I guarantee what you find will get you excited about online video.

Contact this author about Video SEO.        

About the Author: Peter Hamilton is the Project Manager in charge of the Seattle office of ArteWorks SEO. His interest and experience in search engine optimization is largely focused on social media optimization and multi-media facets of exposure specifically video SEO. To learn more about this search engine optimization company, visit www.arteworks.biz.

On Wednesday, Brandon Falls of Google released what they call the Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. This is a twenty two page document that summarizes the basic ideas of SEO so that the average webmaster has some direction on how to improve their rankings for relevant searches. If you refer to the post that provides the Starter Guide pdf, you will see over sixty comments on what various people think about this guide and about Google releasing such a guide. It seems that some SEO’s are not too excited about it, but I say thank goodness.

Now why would a search engine optimization expert be happy about this? Isn’t it putting us out of a job? To be honest, it should make my life much easier. I spend half of my time trying to educate people about many of the practices discussed in this document. I suppose some SEO companies are distraught because companies with smaller websites and budgets can start doing their own work. For me, this is great news. ArteWorks is not scrounging to find underfunded projects for which we can’t produce real results. If the budget threshold is too low, clients are better off doing some work on their own, and this is a great resource I can point this range of client toward. They may not be able to achieve top rankings depending on how competitive their industry is, but at least they can go in the right direction with this great resource at their side.

Of course this starter guide is only one of many that can be found online. It is great for all of us to have this information directly from the horses mouth, but do not be deceived that any of this material is some grand revelation. This guide is exactly what Google has labeled it as, a “starter guide.” With that in mind, there is a great deal of accurate and incredibly important information included, and it might also be extremely helpful when shopping for the right SEO agency. With a little of this education under their belts, consumers and business owners will find a conversation with a search engine optimization company to make much more sense, which can be crucial in developing the best SEO campaign.

I say congratulations to Brandon Falls and the rest of the Search Quality Team for providing a simple, clear, and insightful resource to webmasters and business owners of all levels. It might also prove to drown a few old disputes about what is or is not important when optimizing a website.

About the Author: Peter Hamilton is the Project Manager in charge of the Seattle office of ArteWorks SEO. His interest and experience in search engine optimization is largely focused on social media optimization and multi-media facets of exposure. To learn more about this search engine optimization company, visit www.arteworks.biz.

This blog is a rant. I am not ashamed, even though I have never posted a ranting post before. A discussion entered Sphinn today based on an article about Google’s CEO Backing Obama, and it seems to have gotten some people really upset. Well, let me put in my two cents without taking up a full page of comment space.

The problem with our human interaction with media (including search media) boils down to something I studied back in film school. Have you ever heard of the “hypodermic needle theory” in regards to media? Well, it basically says that what we watch is what be believe. So if I see something that tells me that Dove soap is better than Ivory, I am likely to believe it, even if there is no logical persuasion (now all of you will go purchase Dove soap). As a young idealistic lad at the University of Texas, I thought, NO WAY. No way does that make any sense. People believe what they choose to believe, and these advertisements, politically charged TV shows, or morally biased films only add to the collective resources we have to make opinions. As you can imagine, I did not believe that way for long.

People are like sheep. By and large, we go where we are told. This can be a very scary thing to consider when people have the power to elect presidents, engage in mass riots, and wipe out other races. The hypodermic needle theory certainly has some weight.

Now, back to this article about a political bias in Google. The only thing that scares me more than the bias of one of the world’s most powerful media resources is not knowing what that bias is. Though it was probably not in his public best interest, it is good for us to know that Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, has a democratic (or Obama) bias. A few comments in the discussion supported this idea, saying that Eric Schmidt is going to have a bias either way and he will most likely have some influence with that bias. The only difference with him doing it publicaly is that now we know about it and can adjust our interpretations of his company’s actions accordingly.

And this is great!

When the public hears things like this, the hypodermic needle theory becomes less effective. The more a reader or searcher knows about the company giving the information, the more they will put it under scrutiny and attempt to gather their own opinions. We should not be afraid of knowing the truth! I hope millions of people learn of Google's political affiliations and catch wind of other biases found in major corporations or other powerful entities so that we can begin to live as more analytical creatures than our less fortunate woolen friends.


About the Author: Peter Hamilton is the Project Manager in charge of the Seattle office of ArteWorks SEO. His interest and experience in search engine marketing is largely focused on social media optimization and multi-media facets of exposure. To learn more about search engine optimization, visit www.arteworks.biz.