I just got back from a radio interview where they asked for my Top 5 Blogging Tips. Since I’m a strong supporter of business blogs, and our own web marketing blog generates so much search engine traffic, I figured I’d share those tips here on the Maine SEO Blog.

Own Your Own Domain Name

Make sure that you own your own domain name for your blog. That means you want to blog at mycompany.com/blog or mycompanyblog.com, but not mycompany.typepad.com or mycompany.wordpress.com. Two reasons for this:

1. When you blog on a domain owned by someone else (i.e., wordpress.com or blogspot.com) you’re building up trust for that domain, not for your own. Why would you want to blog for the man when you can blog for yourself?
2. If you ever need to change platforms (we did a couple of years back, moving from TypePad to WordPress) you will lose all of your inbound links if you didn’t first establish your own domain name. All those links to mycompany.typepad.com/whatever? They don’t get to come with you.

Blog so That the Search Engines Can Find You

That means starting with a keyword analysis to determine what keyword phrases your audience is using at the search engines. Then using those keywords in your blog post title, headers, in the first sentence or two, and sprinkled throughout your post. Also drop them in your meta-description, meta-keywords, tags, categories and alt-tags.

Create Keyword-Rich Links Back to Your Website

For many of us, a blog is the place where we establish our credibility and engage with our audience, while our website is where we do our sales. If this is the case for you, you should link your keywords in your blog post to appropriate pages on your website. For example, if you wanted to promote your web design skills you might blog about the top 10 web design mistakes and then link the words website design to the page on your website where you talk about your mad design skills.

Engage Your Audience On and Off Your Blog

If someone takes the time to comment on one of your posts (unless their “name” is SEO India, Whiter Teeth, or Natural Cialis) then you should respond to their comments. Likewise, you should be active in social networking on sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as applicable for your business, and engage your network; ask questions, answer queries, and promote their stuff as well. They will be more receptive and interested when you post a link to your most recent post.

Be Patient and Persistant

Blogging is not like PPC ads on Google; you don’t get page one results from day one. Instead, it takes time to succeed. I’d recommend 2 – 3 posts a week for six months before you start to get the results you’re looking for. Although that may seem daunting, those posts continue to drive new qualified leads to your site for as long as you have your blog. I have posts from 2006 that still bring in hundreds of new visitors every month. Now that’s return on investment.

Rich Brooks
Top 5 Lists Are Easier Than Top 10 Lists

Photo credit: WoodleyWonderWorks

Dear Maine SEO,

We’re trying to decide whether we should set up a business blog or do pay-per-click advertising. Which will provide a better return on investment?

–Marketing in Maine

Dear Marketing,

We’ve never recommended putting all your eggs in one basket, be they proverbial or free range. Both blogs–which help with your organic search rankings–and pay-per-click (PPC) ads–which appear on page one–can help deliver qualified traffic to your website.

One way to look at this is the difference between cooking in an aluminum pan vs. a cast-iron pan. The aluminum pan heats up quicker, but it also cools off quicker.

PPC advertising is a lot like that aluminum pan. If you need to get page one results on Google or Bing, you just need to pay them and your ads will start running immediately. Same day results. That’s fantastic for sites that may not otherwise do well in the organic results, such as new sites or sites that rely heavily on Flash.

However, the moment you stop paying them–whether because you hit your daily budget or you’ve decided that PPC is no longer for you–that traffic stops just as quickly. You’ll get no more benefit out of the money and time you’ve invested.

Compare this to blogging: you may not enjoy much search engine visibility for the first few months of your blogging and you’ll be putting in a lot of work…we’d recommend 2 – 3 keyword-rich posts a week of 300 words or more. However, once you’ve established your blog and built up trust and inbound links, your blog stays hot like a cast-iron pan.

In reviewing the top ten traffic generating posts this month at our web marketing blog, five of the posts are at least a year or two old, the oldest one was written in 2006! Five years later and it’s still pulling in hundreds of new visitors each month…that’s a much better payoff than most PPC campaigns in our opinion.

So, if your budget allows it, we might recommend setting up a small budget for PPC, but develop develop a business blog for your long term success.

Rich Brooks
Now You’re Cooking with Gas

Photo credit: Jeremy Noble

Dear Confused,

Although you can perform SEO at any point before or after the launch of a Web site, I can think of three good reasons why it’s better to start with SEO:

1. It’s less expensive. A good keyword analysis (an important part of a healthy breakfast an SEO package) will drive your content and your copy; if you do it after the site is built, you’re in effect doing the work twice.
2. It’s market research. A keyword analysis may uncover some opportunities that you hadn’t thought of yet; new topics to cover, even new services to offer.
3. It will help focus your social media strategy. You can take your optimal keywords and start working them into your tweets, your Facebook fan page, your YouTube videos and your LinkedIn profile…all things you can be working on while your Web designer builds out your new site.

There is some parts of SEO that can’t be performed until after the site is launched, specifically a link building campaign. Obviously, other sites, blogs and directories won’t want to link to a coming soon page; they’ll be looking for something of value if they’re going to be linking to you.

Rich Brooks
SEO for Small Businesses

(Geez, I hope not. I’ve now posted this same article in three places!!)

Last night during a presentation I gave at TechMaine, someone asked a question about whether it was a bad idea to post the same content at multiple blogs. I said that it wasn’t; that except for your mom, you can’t expect anyone to read all of your content so repurposing that content across multiple blogs is OK.

In fact, the content of the flyte blog and my Internet Marketing 101 blog often overlaps, so I’ve placed certain posts at both blogs. Occasionally I might change up some of the language to be more specific to one of the audiences, but often there’s just not enough time in the day. Plus, I actively engage in article marketing which–when done right–gets your article posted to mulitple Web sites that link back to you.

Her question may have origins in many people’s belief that there’s a Google penalty for duplicate content, and somehow Google will punish you for having the same content in multiple places.

Coincidentally, Google came late last week on their own blog and stated that there is no Google penalty for duplicate content…although some exceptions remain.

<tangent> Google cites an example of duplicate content that mentions the book Everyone Poops; a great kids book that we have in our house. It also inspired this politically themed t-shirt over at Threadless that I love and own. </tangent>

So, go ahead and post your content in more than one place, Google’s cool with that. Just make sure you read their whole blog post first.

Found via Search Engine Roundtable.

Rich Brooks
You Can Say That Again

A few years ago a book came out called Moneyball. It was about how Billy Beane, GM of a small market team, the Oakland A’s, competed and beat teams with a much bigger payroll, like the evil Yankees and the beloved Red Sox.

The idea was that baseball teams had been measuring the wrong things when looking at players: batting average and pitching speed for example. Instead, he looked deeper into the data and found that on-base percentage (which would include walks, hit-by-pitches, etc.) and pitchers who got ground outs were much more valuable, and completely ignored by other teams. In this manner he built a successful team at a fraction of the cost of the Yanks or Sox.

Did it work? Well, some of those big market teams took his advice (why did he share that info anyway?) and the Sox have won two world series since. Now on-base percentage is viewed as an essential metric for hitters, and shown on NESN for every at-bat.

It feels like the same sort of transition is going on now in the SEO world. The leaders in the industry seem to feel that we’ve been measuring the wrong things.

• Last week I read an article by Stephan Spencer called The Latest SEO Trends and Metrics which argues we’re measuring the wrong metrics.
• Just now I read 5 Reasons Why Rankings Are a Poor Measure of Success by Jill Whalen, who claims she hasn’t checked clients’ rankings in years. This is an excellent article that clearly explains why rankings are more subjective than you’d like to believe.
• A few weeks back Google blocked Web Position Gold, a tool used by SEO professionals (including flyte) to measure if and where their clients appear in the first three pages of Google.
• When Nicki in our office manually attempted to check a client’s visibility last week Google banned her after a dozen checks! In fact, the ban affected other computers in our office as well. (Not her fault; I think I asked her to do it. Shame on me.)

For years I’ve argued that search engine rankings don’t matter, Web sites don’t matter, and even conversions don’t matter. The only thing that matters is you sell enough widgets, book enough rooms, or mobilize enough people to your cause. Of course, conversions, attractive Web sites and good search engine rankings all lead to those successes.

So, do search engine rankings matter? Yes, I believe they do. Good search engine visibility will continue to help businesses and organization bring in new traffic. However, measuring is getting tougher as personalized search and localized search continue to evolve and affect search engine results on a person-by-person level.

Perhaps we should be less worried about our search engine rankings, and more about whether those results are driving qualified leads to our sites.