What comes to mind when you hear the word blog?  Is it a bunch of words on a web page, ideally expressing a message of some sort to the reader?  That is what many people first think of when they hear this word, and, initially, this is what many first time blogs are comprised of.  That’s probably fine, if you are an absolute expert on the messages you are sending out.  You will also need to have a large enough following that will link to your site, so that no matter where potential customers go on the web, your blog is certain to be found.

If neither one of these scenarios is the case, don’t be alarmed.  You are much like the many businesses out there who are trying to get an edge in the blogosphere.  There are ways to keep up with and rise above the competition in order to utilize blog optimization in the most beneficial ways possible.

YouTube is video technology that is increasingly making its mark on the Internet.  More industries are using YouTube in order to provide additional services or information that wouldn’t have been possible before.  In the same ways colleges are now employing this tool, so can your business.  Now, not only can you be a leader in providing the specific expertise your business has chosen to hone in on, you can broadcast these messages to your customers through video.  On their end, they have the ability to see these messages on their PCs, laptops, phones, all at their own convenience.

How about an exclusive interview or a press release on a new product or service?  Any and all of these will be received much better when the person viewing it gets to see who the person really is behind the company name and weblog.  If you are not quite ready for video technology yet, there is always podcasts.  Same idea minus the video.  The consumer is still hearing information right from the source, making the whole experience just that much more personal.

Even in the changing world of business and technology, one thing still holds true.  Customers are usually more willing to purchase goods or services when they feel a level of personality from those they are doing business with.  There are many options to choose from when it comes to blog marketing, so it is more about finding the one (or two) that is going to fit your company’s style and comfort level.  Find out more ways to utilize these technologies here.

Optimization is a word you’ll hear a lot, but not all optimization is created equal. Search engine optimization and blog optimization aren’t the same thing. Business blogging may be an integral part of your campaign but your goal for your blog is to grow your reader base. A growing reader base means increased exposure, and more opportunities to promote your blog.

Here are some some specific strategies you can use to optimize your blog:

First, always focus on the reader. Is a blog the best way to reach readers with your message? Are you putting the messages the readers want to see in your blog? Blogging can be a very comfortable medium to deliver your message, but not all information is suitable for blog delivery. Perspective, opinion and experience offered in a conversational style are ideal for blogging. Readers are delighted when they can also share their perspectives and experiences. Encouraging that kind of two-way communication creates a community of interested readers and that’s what you really want with a business blog.

Second, focus on your message. The conversational nature of blogging may make it seem unplanned, but effective business blogging relies on strategy. Understand the message you’re delivering before you sit down to write it and remain focused on it. Understand how your message fits into your readers’ needs. Help them focus on what you have to say by knowing what keywords you’re going to use in your posts and how you will link them to other parts of your site or other sites.

Third, keep your message short. You can always break up a long post into shorter pieces. By focusing on a single message, you help your reader digest what you have to say, remain interested in your message, and anticipate your next post.

Fourth, engage in active blog promotion! Participate in the blogging community by leaving comments on other related blogs. Register your blog in blog directories. Permit social bookmarking and make it easy for readers to forward your material to others who are interested in your subject matter. Promoting your blog will help you develop your readership network and expanding your network helps you to reach your ultimate goal.

When considering all aspects that will make your blog more visible in search engines, link building should be on the list, if not close to the top.  According to Wikipedia, “Reciprocal linking between websites is an important part of the search engine optimization process because Google uses link popularity algorithms (defined as the number of links that led to a particular page and the anchor text of the link) to rank websites for relevancy.”  Put simply, when you have relevant, applicable links leading to and from your blog, you will be more visible on Google’s search engine.

Link popularity is not something to be taken lightly.  Not only will you lower your chances of being seen by the major search engines, you may null your chances completely.  Some engines will even remove sites from their indexes if no links are coming into your site.  Therefore, it is imperative, whether through another business’s site or blog, a social networking site, etc., for another site to have a link to your blog on it.  Blog promotion is really the goal you want to reach for here.

I mentioned the phrase “relevant, applicable links” above.  This is an important factor that some sites do not take seriously.  As a business, you also have to keep in mind what kind of traffic you are drawing to your site with these links.  Although it’s crucial to build links, you do not want to get on a lame link exchange site that has the motto “I’ll link you if you link me.”  Discretion should be used when it comes to who your business is building reciprocal links with.  Just keep in mind the reputation you want to build for your business, and use this professional vision when it comes to who you associate with. 

Utilizing tags in conjunction with your blog is a crucial method to get your blog postings recognized through a search engine.  So what are tags?  Put simply, tags are keywords about the main ideas in your blog entry.  They need to describe your post specifically, but without being too “wordy.”  If you plan to use multiple tags, this can be done easily by separating the keywords by commas.

According to Stephan Spencer, “When tagging is applied to a website, such as a blog, it can significantly increase the site’s traffic by achieving visibility for a much larger array of search terms.”  One of the purposes of a business having a blog is to do just that – increase site traffic.  The more traffic you have to your site, the more opportunities the business has to promote and sell their services.

When what you desire is blog marketing, optimizing your blog through tags, as stated before, is crucial.  In the modern day spider web called the World Wide Web, your business will not get noticed if you do not apply some general guidelines to the blog you are creating.  Tags are one of these universal “rules of thumb.”  If this sounds confusing at first glance, don’t worry.  There are many resources to help hone in on the best tags to use to draw visitors to your site.

There is plenty you can do in the realm of blog optimization. Clearly you ought to be linking to your business website and promoting your product/service like crazy. But what do you do with your images? Do you even use images on your blog? Read on, bloggers.

Using images is a brilliant way to employ your keywords more often without sounding repetitive or obnoxious. When you import images into your blog posts, you can use what is called an alt attribute. An alt attribute (or alternative text attribute—also incorrectly called an alt tag) is used essentially to name your image. This tells browsers what to display in place of the image in case visitors to the site have images blocked on their browsers or they are visually impaired. It is also useful for people with slow, low bandwidth Internet connections and people using handheld devices to access your website.

By appropriate using the alt attribute for each of your images, you can better optimize your blog posts and ensure your page is indexed correctly with search engines. You can use your keyword phrases as alt text for your images to build up your keyword repertoire and listings in search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

It only takes a moment to add your alt tag and it very much assists the “blind” search engines which cannot actually see your images. Neglecting this attribute is a lazy mistake, so perk up and get with it! Beef up your alt attributes and see the difference it can make for your blog.

“You know, I get completely dumbfounded at conferences sometimes when webmasters ask me things like: “Can Google read my CSS?” I’m like, who gives a shit? Shouldn’t you be more concerned about finding ways to get end users to interact with your web pages, rather than losing sleep over whether a bot can read a little bit of your gobbledygook.”

Of course, if you are blog marketing, you are well on your way to giving your end users ways to interact. It’s called content and if you have been adhering to the basic principles of basic blog optimization, you’ve dealt with the “gobbledygook”.

“…if you can make pages the best they can be for crawling and indexing, we should carry on doing that. Keep the fundamentals in place. But just getting pages crawled and indexed doesn’t do a great deal for a client if he’s not ranking for anything. It’s like taking a bunch of pages from one black hole and placing them in another.”
Mike Grehan

And it is your blog content, RSS publishing, podcasts and videos that take your site far beyond a black hole and a recent study by Online Publishers Association indicates that content is where web surfers are increasingly spending their time.

“Visiting content sites has become the predominant task among web surfers, according to a new four-year analysis of internet activity.The new survey from OPA shows that internet users’ share of time spent with content increased to 47% in 2007 from 34% in 2003.

According to the study, conducted by the Online Publishers Association, internet users are spending nearly half their time online visiting content, a 37% increase in share of time from four years ago. Time spent with online properties took on new significance in July when Nielsen/Net Ratings said it would report the measure, adding another layer of complexity to analyzing the behavior of online audiences. Page views and number of unique users have long been used by advertisers to figure out whether a website’s audience is worth courting.”
(Source)

Blog optimization for multiple languages is a complex and potentially expensive exercise. O.K., but how bout starting with one language? Small business bloggers in America are increasingly becoming aware of their Hispanic market and wonder how best to design their site and produce blog content that can easily travel the language barrier.

Blog Marketing to Your Hispanic Market

When you are Johnson & Johnson, who launched a Chinese version of their award winning Baby Center parenting blog earlier this year and plan their Hispanic release this September, you can afford to hire a bevy of native translators.

Laurel Wentz from Advertising Age quotes Jon Stross of J&J BabyCenter:

“As we looked around the world and rated each market, the U.S. Hispanic market, for size, growth and priority with big advertisers, was very obviously up there along with the U.K. and China,” said Jon Stross, general manager-international, BabyCenter.”

B2B marketing is also wide open. Questamente Network (questamente.com) has announced the launch of it’s dual language site, catering to the ever growing community of Hispanic business owners in America, hoping to be the one-stop-shop library and resource for the Hispanic entrepreneur and businessman  for the estimated 2 million Hispanic-owned business in the U.S.

So what do you do if you do not have a J&J budget to translate your site and write relevant blog marketing content for your Latino/Hispanic market?

WordPress Plugins, Google’s Translate Language Tools, or Alta Vista’s Babaelfish will get you part of the way there. However, if your analytics demostrate a good percentage of your traffic and sales originating from the Latino market, you have justification to budget for a bi-lingual blogger, preferably Hispanic, in order to produce relevant content that actually addresses the cultural nuances of your target market.

Multi-lingual SEO

Before you make any final decisions regarding the additional budget or staffing, consider this (my emphasis):

“That being said, this hesitance to invest in multi-language search engine optimization provides an enormous opportunity for marketers who wish to rise above their competitors and take advantage of the void. With significantly less saturation of Spanish-speaking SEO, there is little competition for brands looking to reach Spanish-speaking searchers with the strategic use of multi-language SEO.
(Source)

How can you pass the opportunity up without exploring your options? Contact your SEO experts and get your multi-lingual ducks in a row.

Blog marketing through the use of videos is rapidly gaining interest as it continues to result in increased traffic and conversions for online marketers.We recently touched on the importance of optimizing the images on your website. In a recent interview, Rohit Bhargava of Interactive Marketing confirms the importance for image and video/podcast optimization.

Image, Video and Podcast Optimization

“Image search and video search and big open playgrounds right now. This is mainly because there is a gap in the rising quality of search versus the content that is tagged and indexed properly by brands and marketers. Do a quick image search on google and you will see what I mean. If any brand focused on this, they could own their own image searches with relative ease and optimize their videos for search through transcripts and tagging properly (among other things). I truly don’t understand why more brands have not made this a priority.”

As the technology evolves to better tag video and Podcasts, the above suggested transcripts are well advised, not only for the purposes of search engine visibility but for the convenience of your reader. Some readers are not plugged in or can’t listen to your broadcast at work. They, however, still want to know what you have to say and a transcript will be appreciated.

Another question that arises - which relates more to the quality of your broadcast than actual optimization technique - is the question of background music. MasterMedia.org has put together a list of options that will be worth bookmarking for future reference. Follow the link below.

Improve Video and Podcasts With Music

“Finding free music for videos or audio Podcasts seems to be one of the hardest activities. Most of the audio content available online is protected by copyrights and the threat of bumping into illegal content is always in the air. Is it possible to have access to music that is freely downloadable and distributable?

Nowadays the increased popularity of alternative distribution licenses such as Creative Commons has made possible for musicians to publish their music online and share it with others while guaranteeing some fundamental rights for themselves.

This phenomenon promoted the birth of several online music directories, whose aim is to collect music which has been voluntarily contributed by independent artists. The songs available in such directories are freely downloadable and users can, for example, utilize them to produce videoclips and more complex audio files (in general for non commercial use).”
(Source)

Blog optimization and achieving high search engine visibility is not a one shot proposition, as any company establishing their online presence can attest to. Many small businesses recognize the necessity and benefits of implementing a blog site platform to secure and advance their online presence through blog marketing, podcasting, etc. The question that ultimately arises is if they have the staff qualified to take on the responsibility of optimization, keyword research and content writing.

In-House Search Engine Marketing or Outsource?

Alan, a small midwest retailer catering to the outdoor sportsmen crowd expressed both delight and concern over his company’s recent series of successful blog marketing campaigns. He discovered that he enjoyed his emerging role as the regional ‘outdoors ambassador’ that he had developed by regularly posting to the company blog. He found the online “community” that had become his “brand enthusiasts” to be the best WOM that money could buy.

Alan’s concern was, given the fact that he wanted to continue his online growth, should he start training an in-house team or continue out sourcing all of his SEM and content writing. A savvy businessman, he understood it would take time to put together an in-house team and was weighing the cost effectiveness of growing his own department.

MarketingProf.com poses some questions that Alan - or any other small to medium size business - will want to investigate.

SEM Questions to Ask

• How many team members have Web writing experience? Have they written Web pages, PPC ads or both?
• If your team is Web-writing savvy, how many pages are they producing per week now?
• How has your company researched keyphrases in the past? What team member would maintain a seasonal and/or long-term keyphrase list and disseminate that information throughout the department?
• What team members have PPC bid management experience? Are they also familiar with PPC strategy, such as dayparting and ad testing?
• Who would be the main point of content for marketing-related SEO questions and deliverables?

(Source)

Blog optimization requires that you learn the language that your customer is using when seeking you out. After you have developed a “lexicon” of keywords and keyword phrases that are representative of you customers’ “lingo”, you have opened the door to the power of “pull” advertising. Your optimized site will pull your customer towards you, as opposed to “pushing” them towards you via traditional advertising.

“For most of advertising, the ad and the advertiser live in separate universes. There’s little connection between most TV, radio, or print spots and the actual businesses those ads represent. But things are different in search.

Search drives traffic directly to your online doorstep. It also provides metrics that allow you to tie a conversion back to the ad inventory that drives it. Search’s tight link between conversions and ads create a whole new level of connection between ads and businesses…”

And therein lies the key. Analytics allow you to increase you website conversion rates by fine tuning your optimization according to the “keyword language” that your customer is using when seeking out your product or service. A recent study promises that a substantial number of your customers will be doing exactly that.

“Edison Media Research announced its findings that 33% of American consumers see the Internet as their “most essential medium” — placing the Internet just shy of TV’s 36% foothold, and way ahead of radio’s 17%. The Internet, not radio, is the new No. 2. As the gateway to the Internet, search will inevitably grow as well.”
(Source)

Blog marketing has the advantage of being highly responsive to your target market, offering metrics that can enable you to calibrate the language you use to harmonize with the language of your customer.