From title tags to internal linking, from optional excerpts to rel=nofollow, this session covers the biggest search engine optimization mistakes WordPress bloggers make, and how to fix them.
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Blogs
Ecommerce Blogging: Who, What And When
If you’ve even remotely considered adding a blog for your eCommerce site, then this article is for you. In this article originally featured on Practical eCommerce, Jeff Muendel helps eCommerce business owners design a strategy behind blogging.
A focused, well-written blog can get readers hooked on the blog and promote repeat visits to the website or garner subscriptions via RSS feeds and email newsletters. These recurring communications will help to tie potential customers to your site, encourage natural link building and increase repeat visits. Journalists are also more likely to follow a blog or subscribe via RSS than to visit the corporate site repeatedly. So, several avenues of search optimization and online marketing can be addressed with a single blog entity.
From the SEO benefits of business blogging to how it can help your customers, Jeff covers the basics of “who, what and when” of blogging. Read the full article at Practical eCommerce here.
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Interactive Marketing: Reaching Customers
UW Wisconsin Madison, Executive Education, Interactive Marketing — Madison, WI
Search engine marketing
- Making your site “search engine friendly”
- “Pay-per-click” search advertising
- Benchmarking, competitive intelligence and ROI analysis
- Trends in contextual, behavioral and local advertising
Creating a buzz — viral marketing
- Blogs, RSS feeds, forums, wikis and more
- Harness “word of mouse” to enhance your brand
- Identifying the “sneezers” who will spread your viral message
Web analytics
Speakers:
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts
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Nuts & Bolts: Case Study
In this article written by Kate DeBevois for Target Marketing, she talks about the success of Netconcepts’ client Steve Spangler. She writes, “Steve Spangler, famous for creating a 30-foot geyser of Diet Coke by dropping Mentos into a soda bottle, not only has mastered the art of science, but also the art of blogging to optimize natural search results and increase Web sales.” Read more about how Netconcepts helped Mr. Spangler achieve success in this case study article about Steve Spangler Science.
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Twelve SEO Mistakes Most Bloggers Make
In this article Stephan Spencer, President and Founder of Netconcepts, writes about the most, common mistakes that bloggers make, and what to do about them. From title tag optimization to keyword URLs, you’ll want to read this article to optimize your personal or business blog to help your blog increase its search visibility.
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Interactive Marketing: Reaching Customers
UW Wisconsin Madison, Executive Education, Interactive Marketing — Madison, WI
Search engine marketing
- Making your site “search engine friendly”
- “Pay-per-click” search advertising
- Benchmarking, competitive intelligence and ROI analysis
- Trends in contextual, behavioral and local advertising
Creating a buzz — viral marketing
- Blogs, RSS feeds, forums, wikis and more
- Harness “word of mouse” to enhance your brand
- Identifying the “sneezers” who will spread your viral message
Web analytics
Speakers:
Stephan Spencer, Founder and President, Netconcepts
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Six Tactics for Blog Content That Works
“What’s the top secret to developing a winning blog, one that draws an audience, grows your brand and improves your products sales?” writes Hallie Mummert, editor in chief for Target Marketing. In this article, Hallie writes about Steve Spangler’s relationship with Netconcepts Founder and President, Stephan Spencer. “Spangler works with Stephan Spencer, president of Netconcepts, an e-marketing services firm that specializes in natural search, to develop and optimize his blog.” Read this article to discover “a few lessons they have learned about what information to post and how to go about doing it so your blog becomes more than a one-way conversation.”
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Web 2.0 for Publishers
In this presentation to The Wisconsin Publishers’ Production Club’s (WPPC) Catalog Innovations meeting in January, Netconcepts’ Director of E-Business, Hershel Reese explains how Web 2.0 has great implications for catalogers and publishers online.
RSS feeds are changing the way people are consuming their media. You need to stay on top of this channel in order to remain competitive online.
Web 2.0 is also changing the way people interact with web properties. The user generated content phenomena is helping site owners to actively engage an audience and build community online.
This presentation will also discuss how one online publisher, www.dmnews.com, is leveraging the Web 2.0 tool kit.
Social Media Sites are emerging as a channel to be reckoned with online. If you are not participating in these communities you are missing opportunities for increased brand recognition and traffic to your sites.
You Will Discover:
- Best practices for RSS usage
- The benefits of user generated content
- Why tagging matters for website owners
- How industry leaders are leveraging Web 2.0
- How social media can bump up your traffic and impressions
This presentation was originally held on Tuesday, January 30, 2007 at The Country Springs Hotel in Pewaukee, WI.
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Five Tips for Making the Most of Blogs
Abny Santicola, Editor, FundRaising Success Advisor, calls on the expertise of Netconcepts’ Founder and President, Stephan Spencer last week at Direct Marketing Association’s (DMA) Annual Conference & Expo in San Francisco. Abny caught up with Spencer after his “Blogs, Podcasts and RSS: New Tools for Customer Acquisition and CRM” conference session.
In this article, Spencer discusses how blogs can serve as great marketing tools for non-profit organizations as well. Spencer also shares his success with, humanitarian organization and personal blog of former President Jimmy Carter, The Carter Center.
Spencer closes with 5 insider-tips for making the most of a blog.
Read this entire article and learn key blog concepts to put your non-profit on the blogosphere map.
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Increasing Your Blog Traffic
Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz has graciously shared 21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic, and there are some gems in there. I’d like to piggyback on a few of Rand’s points:
- 1. Choose the Right Blog Software (or Custom Build) — I’d say that over 95% of the time, WordPress will do the job and will be scalable for future needs. I have yet to come across a client blog project that necessitated a custom-built blog software.
- 2. Host Your Blog Directly on Your Domain — Rand makes a bold statement: “Hosting your blog on a different domain from your primary site is one of the worst mistakes you can make.” I disagree. I can think of numerous examples where the blog is more trusted, more buzzworthy, and/or more linkworthy because it’s at an arms length from the company’s site. Consider the hypothetical example of an insurance conglomerate authoring a blog about getting a healthier lifestyle, in order to attract prospects to sell insurance to. Such a blog at Gettinghealthy.com sounds helpful and unbiased, whereas having it at metlife.com/gettinghealthyblog (remember, hypothetical example… metlife is just used here to illustrate the point) comes off as salesy and self-serving.
- 4. Participate at Related Forums & Blogs — I’d just like to make it clear that you’re not doing this for link juice (most links in blog comments and forum posts have “link condoms” (rel=nofollow tags) automatically added). Instead, you’re doing this to increase your visibility to, and credibility with, bloggers who read those blogs and forums.
- 9. Invite Guest Bloggers — I really like this idea, and I’d like to add my suggestion that you also do phone or Skype interviews of guests and podcast those on your blog.
- 15. Archive Effectively — Rand highlights a tough balancing act: “For search traffic (particularly long tail terms), it can be best to offer the full content of every post in a category on the archive pages, but from a usability standpoint, just linking to each post is far better (possibly with a very short snippet). ” I find the “Optional Excerpt” in WordPress to be invaluable for achieving this balance. The Optional Excerpt is one of the fields in the Write Post form that most bloggers ignore, but if you use it, you can code your non-permalink pages (like your category pages) to display the excerpt instead of the full post or instead of the paragraphs proceeding a “more” tag in your post copy. That’s exactly what we’ve done on my company’s corporate site, which runs on WordPress — for example, all the testimonials listed on our Testimonials tag page display excerpts. That gives you more flexibility to summarize and highlight particular sections or keywords from the full post.
- 16. Implement Smart URLs — Rand says that “just re-writing a ?ID=450 to /450 has improved search traffic considerably on several blogs we’ve worked with.” I would definitely agree with that. We too have evidence that a blog or site with rewritten URLs flows PageRank more efficiently throughout the site. So don’t rest on your laurels if you have a blog with dynamic URLs, even if your blog is fully indexed by the engines. Your pages will rank better if you rewrite the URLs.
- 19. Make Effective Use of High Traffic Days — What a great idea, to watch your traffic and increase your posting frequency and posting quality on days where your traffic is highest! It makes the best use of the traffic spikes. In fact, you might even want to hold back on publishing your very best posts and instead save them for high-traffic days.
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