LinkedIn Business Development: Boost Your Sales Pipeline from Your Connections – Dean DeLisle
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June 3, 2014Content Marketing and SEO: How to Create and Optimize Your Blogs – By Dean R. DeLisle
Blogging is one of those topics we can talk about for eight hours and write a whole book on. Let’s see if we can balance it out in a simple blog post.
I recently had a situation during which a client said that blogs were not properly optimized, so we should not publish them. They were right, but they were also wrong. In today’s world, so many people worry about search engine optimization (SEO) and forget about good content marketing by sacrificing a great read for a Google ranking.
Well, why can’t you have both? You can.
The Law of Attraction
When we look at generating online traffic blogs there are some simple fundamentals. We start with answering the magic question: who are the blogs targeting? Who are we looking to attract to the site? Once we establish that, we determine which keywords are most likely to be typed to search for the company, product or services. We use a series of tools for this, including Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends.Typically, we also take a look at a competitor’s blog and trending sites like Technorati. If enough exist to create a campaign, we use these keywords in waves so that we can use them in a proper cycle. Once we work through this, we map campaigns around those keywords.
If you’re less informed about how Google search engine ranking work, take a look at this video to see it explained very well!
Anchor Phrases and Waves
Let’s say we have 12 top keyword phrases that our prospects love to type into Google. We find root phrases that can anchor waves for blogs, articles and posts. For instance if one phrase is “Proper use of Social Media,” we anchor and rotate months on “Social Media” and “Proper Use,” not always together. This will allow us to make a “blended index” while not over saturating the blog with the same keywords. Keep in mind that you need to continuously revisit your keywords and phrases, as trends change and your target will most likely move around. Hence the next step is to provide total consciousness to your keyword phrases.
Trending Topics – Ride the Wave
Once the blog structure is charted, we scout the internet for competitor sites and popular search results with our own keywords and source sites. This helps us learn what others are looking for, what people want, and find ideas and topics that are trending. Then our creative team works with the author to determine a great trending title using those keywords.
Writing with Flow for the Reader
Now at this moment, you can write with the intent to use keywords and be highly optimized on Google. The issue with this is that very few blog writers who are sophisticated enough to be mindful of the reader while writing and thinking of keywords. We offer three options:
- Write with flow for the reader and allow our optimization specialists to take the blog and modify just enough to allow for it to get indexed and scanned by Google (I am doing this now)
- Write with keywords in mind and insert proper mix and balance, this is an art form and even all my years of writing blogs, I still find it challenging.
- Write with total flow, forget keywords and just allow the reader to enjoy the article, then you say, well how does the reader find the blog? Read on….
Balance and Still Get Found
The way Google algorithms work (if you watched the video above) is that they scan for both the content relevancy and the linked site relevancy. This means that if there are associated blogs, sites and other content (like the video) that contain those keywords and phrases, Google will properly consider and score those on their scans. This means if your blogs have a good level of balance you will be just fine. So a potential success formula, which varies for everyone, could be to write a keyword optimized blog for every three total flow blogs. Once your site begins to gain authority and index on those keywords you will get found. This is why there is a large surge in “Content Marketing.”
Partner, Backlink and Win
To enhance your chances of success even more, make sure you publish a balance of your articles with other popular blogs and allow those organizations to post on your site as well. The relevant keyword and backlink trail will get wired and increase your authority for your blogs, entire site, and ranking with Google.
Syndication – yes it’s legal!
We have a balance of syndication, which is a fancy word for saying that we manually and automatically socially push the blog posts out to people, social networks and mobile. This is a science. If you are just mindful and do this within your social network sites, you can get a feel for how people respond and react in your networks from likes, comments and shares.
Don’t forget to step on the scale
Last but not least, don’t forget to measure blog traffic and comments on your social network sites. Subscribers still count, so many people are now finding their blogs so well on social networks that they are subscribing less and less and RSS feeders are fading. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues.
That’s all for this blog article. If you do some of these things or for sure all of these things we guarantee success. However, you do have to keep at it and maintain the management of this process. We post and blog over 10,000 pieces of content per month and we also have to keep on this. If you have other thoughts and ideas we welcome all comments.
