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4 Most Common Blogging Mistakes Made by Small Businesses

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Everywhere you turn it seems like everyone is talking about how important blogging is for small business (and big business) websites. That is true; blogging is good for SEO since adding new posts keeps the website fresh, and more content means that you can get more long tail traffic; blogging is also good for establishing and maintaining good relationship with your customers, and for building your brand. The reasons pro are all good. The cons – there aren’t any. Unless you’re doing it wrong.

The only thing worse than not having a blog on your business website is to attempt to blog without really understanding how it should be done. And that’s the mistake many small businesses make. Are you among them? Before you start defending yourself saying “hey, I’m doing everything by the book, I’m doing my research, I’m interlinking my posts…” – we aren’t talking here about the technical aspect of blogging, and the mistakes listed below are so common that you may not even realize that they shouldn’t be done, since many others are doing them.

Are you talking about yourself a lot?

This is by far the most common one. Without even realizing it, many businesses are creating blog posts that are about them – and not about their customers. Of course, the customers probably do want to know a bit more about the people behind the brand, but that doesn’t involve the topics such as their pets, the fight with the kindergarten teacher, the plumbing issues – would you be telling them about that face to face? No? Then don’t write about these things on your business blog either.

Are you paying too much or too little attention to your post titles?

Crafting a good post title is what often makes a difference between whether people will read your post or not. A good title lets them know what the post is about, and invites them to click on it and read the rest at the same time. If you aren’t paying attention to your titles, you may as well be creating the most engaging content in the post itself – there’s a very good chance that no one will know about it.

On the other hand, if you have mastered the art of crafting the catchy titles that provide a great click through rate, but you aren’t delivering in the content, your visitors will probably feel tricked – and then you can forget about having them leave their email address, or calling for a free consultation. You haven’t delivered the first chance you had, why should they bother with you further.

Are you too much or too little of a perfectionist about your content?

You should be neither. You should be aware of the fact that your content will be seen and read by the people who are very important to your business – your potential customers, so do your best to make it worth them while. But don’t go overboard and polish it over and over again, so that it takes you two weeks to finish one article. Keep in mind that it will probably never be perfect – but it needs to be good enough.

Are you not showing that you value the content you’ve created?

If you don’t care about your content enough to promote it yourself, then why would your readers care to do it? If you don’t think that comments on your posts are worth reading and responding to, then your readers will feel the same. You have to be the first one to show that your latest post is really useful/entertaining/engaging – you are the one person who shouldn’t forget about that piece.

This post was written ba Andrew Handley, from http://www.midislandcollision.com/. If you recognize yourself in one or more of these points, then it’s time to stop and re-think your blogging strategy. Then go back and re-do all the posts on your blog – some of them will probably scream: Delete!




DIY Search engine Optimization tips #1

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Individual website owners and bloggers usually can’t afford to pay SEO (Search Engine Optimization) companies to optimize their sites so that they reach the top of the search engines, however there are a lot of things that you can do yourself to improve your page rank and publicize their sites.

Here’s some tips

1. Plan your site for optimization from the beginning.

Start by choosing a domain name that includes words that could be considered important keywords for your site. For example, if you are creating a gardening site it would be great to have the word garden or gardening in your domain name. Use keywords when you create pages on your site too. A sub page of a gardening site might be called rosegardening.html .

Titles of posts in your blog – if your blog is for a specific niche should also contain keywords that pertain to the post and to the theme of the site itself.

2. keep search engines in mind as you design your site

Search engines use the text on a site to figure out what the site is about, and in part, where to place it on the search pages. If you use photos on your site always use the alt text tag to describe what the photo is about. This will make the search engines spiders and robots job easier.

Sites designed with flash format are difficult for search engines to navigate and index, as they don’t contain much text for the search engines to use to classify the site.

It’s also been said that long strips of java script might be better put in an external file that is called upon from the main page or CSS style files.

3. Each page of your site should have it’s own title tag

It’s very simple to make sure that each page has a title – simple use a Meta Title tag in the header for each page, and individually give each page it’s own title. Search Engines look at the title of each page as being one of the most important factors in telling it’s robots and spiders what the page is about. As per my earlier example if you created a gardening site and you talked about different types of plants on the various sub-pages you would want each page to have a title that contains information about the plant that is being discussed in the page. For example a sub page of the gardening site my have the title “Growing Daisies” if it discussed how to grow daisies.

Title tags should also contain important keywords that will help people find that specific page on your site when they are using a search engine. Think about what words you would choose to search for the type of information that your page is about and use some of those words in the title.

The main page of a gardening site might have a title tag – “Gardening- plants for the garden, gardening tips, and gardening FAQ’s”

4. Be sure to add a description tag to each of your pages:

A description tag is as important as the title tag. The first couple of sentences on your page should summarize what the page is about using important keywords and search phrases that you think people would use when searching for that page.

A gardening sites description tag might say “XYZ Gardening provides information to gardeners about growing plants in the garden, plant profiles, gardening tips and advice.”

5. Put your keywords into headers and headlines on your page.

Search engines give high value to the use of header tags on a page. Header tags are used to enclose the title of an article or as a sub heading in a page. I can’t write the full code here but the tags are H1 H2 H3 H4 and so on. The headline of your page should have a H1 header tag around the words.

Good blog themes often come with CSS style sheets that incorporate important items like header tags into the theme. You shouldn’t really have to think of this feature on a well made blog theme, but if you are writing and designing your own site or theme please remember that header tags are very important.

Please remember that article titles and sub-headings within an article or page should contain important keywords as well. Use words that best describe the content of the article or page when you make a header tag.

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