The Maine SEO Blog

There aren’t a million grandiose secrets to blogging. (Although that would make a fantastic blogpost.) Write well, gain an audience, use your keywords…the list goes on and on.

There is one little thing you could do in order to get more readers, more subscribers, more retweets, more everything. And shh…it’s a secret.

It’s all about the title.

Hitting people’s pain points with your title is a sure fire recipe for a successful post. And here are some ideas on just how to do that.

• Don’t be afraid to be a little sarcastic.
• Create lists. “10 Things You Can’t Live Without”, “4 Reasons You Need To Know About X”, etc.
• Do the opposite. Instead of “5 Ways to Save Money with Y”, make the title “5 Ways Not to Lose Money using Y”.
• Think about your audience. “10 Things You’re Doing Wrong as an SEO”, “8 WordPress Plugins You’re Crazy Not to Be Using”, etc.

Then, after you come up with your award winning title, follow it up with some great content. That way, when someone sees a tweet, facebook status, search result, digg entry, etc. with your title and click, they aren’t disappointed.

Nicki Hicks
Sarcasm is bliss

Image Credit

Like Mom used to say…If you don’t have anything to blog about, don’t blog at all.

Wait a minute that’s not right. Quite the contrary, in fact. Keep blogging!

Out of ideas? Just not feeling creative? We all get like that. Here are some tips and tricks to help you through (less creative) rainy days…

Stock up. When your writing juices are flowing, keep going. (Excuse the rhyme.) If you have the time to devote, then write as many blogposts as you can. You’ll appreciate the stock pile when you have a blogging dry spell.

Short, sweet tips. Something you do, maybe everyday, may be the exact thing someone else can’t figure out and has been searching for relentlessly. A quick, simple “how-to”. For example, I couldn’t figure out how to fix my Google Analytics scheduled reports and when I finally did, I wrote about it.

Top 10/Most Popular Posts. If you can’t think of anything at all, go with what you’ve already done. Compile a list of your most popular blog posts – it might help someone see what they’ve missed!

Videos/Articles…not by you. If you see a great video, article, post, even podcast…take a clip, copy and paste, or drop it into a blogpost (giving the author credit, of course). Then, write a little about your take on it.

Write it down as you think of it. If you come up with a really great idea, but don’t have the time to expand on it, jot some notes down. Better yet, use a voice recording device and transcribe it later.

How about you; what’s your best tip for when you can’t think of anything to write?

Nicki Hicks
Today is my creative day

You may think you have a killer blogpost – and you probably do, but are you gaining all the search engine traffic you possibly could?

1. Choose a narrow topic. If, after you start writing, realize you’ve chosen a broad subject that you could write for days on – split it up into smaller blogposts; even a series.

2. Choose a title. Not just any title. Think about how to make your topic the most interesting it could possibly be. Lists are great (Top 10 Reasons to…, 5 Ways You Could…, 6 Things You Can’t…); how-to’s and answers to frequently asked questions are also hot blog topics.

Think about what your audience might be searching for in order to find an article like this, then phrase accordingly.

3. Continuing to think about what your audience is searching for, create content around those keywords. In other words, write keyword rich content – using your 2-3 major keywords about 2-3 times. As a general rule of thumb, it’s best to keep content short and sweet: around 250 words should do it.

4. Include an image if it applies. As they say, a picture’s worth a thousand words.

5. Don’t forget about video – maybe there’s one that exists already, or one you could create that helps engage your readers – include it!

6. A call to action is critical, if it makes sense. It would probably apply for this post if I ended with: “For more helpful tips on blogging, contact flyte new media today.” Notice I linked that entire sentence. I could have linked “contact flyte new media”, but that wouldn’t have been taking advantage of anchor text, now would it?

7. Depending on what type of content management system you use, you’ll have the ability to assign tags and categories to your post. In WordPress, you can list a number of tags – or keywords – you’d like to assign to the post. Tags are helpful if a reader wants to see related posts tagged with the same keyword.

Categories help group your blogposts into just that – categories. Try to keep your categories general enough so you can keep them to less than 10.

Nicki Hicks
Blogging 101

A few months ago, one of the folks I follow on Twitter posted a link to Wordtracker’s Keyword Questions, a great little tool that gives you insight into the world of long tail search. Or, as Wordtracker puts it: “find the questions people are asking in your market”.

It uses questions people have actually searched for and – bonus! – how many times within the past year they’ve been searched for. But don’t let the low number scare you – 1. we are talking about long tail here and 2. this is the number of people who used this exact wording.

Here are the questions about keywords:

And here are some about SEO:

The questions on social media were particularly interesting:

It just goes to show you…it might be worth taking a look at the keywords before you write your next blogpost, article, and especially webpage in order to target the long tail. Interestingly enough, as I was writing this, Jill Whalen posed a question to the Twitterverse about this very topic. Here are some of the responses.

Nicki Hicks
Long Tail Searcher

We’ve begun, of late, to suggest our clients not only optimize their sites, but their blogs too.  Here are some easy ways to start:

1. Keyword-rich titles. Since your blog titles become your page titles, make them keyword-rich and, at the same time, enticing to your readers.  Using negative titles can often be a good hook (like “5 Ways to Lose Money this Holiday Season”).
2. Optimize your categories. Category names have an obsene about of SEO benefits: they are links, usually apart of the URL, and can also help readers make decisions (for example, when looking into your archives – which categories interest them).  So, category titles should be keyword-rich and descriptive.
   There’s a discrepancy as to whether or not it’s better to assign a blogpost to a single category or more than one.  Typically, your blog will choose which category it is designated to, and Google will index it under that category.  Duplicate content is the issue here, so watch out!
3. Link Building. Ping back your own blogposts as often as you can – as long as they provide a good resource for what you’re talking about.  Link to other sites as you would on your website – to quality sites and blogs.
4. Post often. Blogs tend to get crawled and indexed more because of how often new content is added.  For a new blog, posting 2-3 times a week should be a priority.  After your blog has collected a certain amount of trust and readership, posting at least once a week (depending on how much you have to write about) is important.
5. Bonus out-of-the-box idea: Set your blog to follow comment links. This way, your readers will more likely leave intelligent comments, knowing they get a link out of it – and therefore starting a more interesting coversation.  Of course, you’ll need to monitor your comments that much more heavily.

So if you have a blog or are thinking about starting one, remember…SEO is just as important there as for your website!!!

Nicki Hicks
Maine Blogging