Setting up a blog is one thing. Making it work as hard as possible for your business is another. Here’s twenty five ways to attract more people to your blog and keep search engines happy:

1. use key words and phrases within your posts and post titles to make your blog search engine friendly. When search engines ‘know’ what your blog is about they can classify it accurately and make sure it pops up in front of people who search on your key terms. Need advice? WordPress and the other major blog platforms all provide blog SEO tutorials and guides. And Google’s keyword research tool is as good as any
2. take advantage of SEO-related plug-ins that do a lot of the hard work for you. I use an all-in-one SEO pack plug-in for WordPress
3. include images. They make such a difference to the way blog posts look, and people are more likely to read illustrated posts
4. vary the length of your posts to keep human visitors interested. Some short, some medium, some long
5. Tweet your posts on Twitter and promote them on Facebook, LinkedIn etcetera for an integrated approach and extra traffic
6.  make sure your blog post urls are simple and readable, not great long strings of letters, symbols and numbers. You can get information about how to create user friendly URLs via most popular blog platforms, and with some you can get it sorted in one click
7. put your blog on the same url as your business so all that lovely SEO juice benefits your site
8. check Google Analytics regularly to spot trends, peaks or troughs. You might find some subjects attract more interest than others, acting as valuable link bait
9. download a good spam filter so your blog doesn’t fill up with crappy spam comments
10. make sure your blog ‘pings’ out to the world every time you create a new post. Check out your back-end blog CMS to find out how to make it happen
11. include links to useful, entertaining, interesting, relevant and exciting places
12. make your blog look as good as possible, while keeping it simple. Eye candy helps pull in readers!
13. be consistent. If you’re the only contributor, make sure you use the same tone of voice throughout your posts
14. add your blog address to your email communications, as part of your contact details
15. invite comments by actually asking people to interact, posing questions like, “What do you think?”and “What are your experiences?”
16. create blog titles that knock people’s socks off, make them want to read on and give you back-links
17. vary the subject matter to keep things interesting: Q&As, special offers, useful links, surveys, news and views, thought pieces, funny stuff, controversial stuff, product launches…
18. keep it soft sell. There’s nothing more boring than reading a hard sell blog full of excessive trumpet blowing
19. keep your eye on trending topics and react to breaking news as it breaks
20. allow guest blog posts from reliable sources
21. ask for contributions from people in your field you admire and respect
22. write about customers or business partners, encouraging them to link from their site to your blog for extra link oomph
23. blog regularly to keep search engine bots and spiders on their toes and get your blog re-indexed frequently
24. write in plain language and don’t be scared to express your personality. The theory of Likeonomics is huge these days and marketers everywhere are discovering the value of being human in a business context!
25. allow comments, but learn what’s spam and what isn’t. Once you get the hang of it it’s easy to distinguish genuine feedback from comment spam, which can devalue your blog in savvy readers’ eyes. Your blog’s spam filter plug-in will catch some of it, but not necessarily all of it

(Thanks to http://www.sxc.hu/profile/jaylopezs for the royalty-free image)

It’s good to know human beings are nowhere near as predictable as marketers like to think we are. 

Despite the vast amount of data sites like Facebook hold about members, the social network’s data-driven adverts are still way off target.

OK, I may be in my forties and engaged to be married. But that doesn’t mean I’m into anti-ageing products. I don’t want a massive great meringue of a wedding dress either. Nor am I interested in celebrities or concerned about my weight: I couldn’t give a stuff how much blubber Cheryl Cole has lost!

These days marketers have access to ‘big data’, which by rights should make targeting offers tightly to people’s needs, preferences and lifestyles much easier. But in real life, it doesn’t. The conclusions they come to are still far too simplistic.

In reality Facebook’s efforts are no better than thirty years ago, when data driven targeting was the direct marketer’s holy grail and we only had postcode, sex and buying history to play with.

If Facebook filled my account with adverts for stuff  I’m really interested in, things like 1950s German art pottery, ’60s and ’70s oil paintings, antique rugs, craft materials, tickets for Radio 4 comedies, garden stuff, wood carving gear and good books, I’d be a happy bunny and would probably click through. That’s what I’d call targeting!

I was chatting with someone about insurance direct marketing the other day, lamenting the fact that most insurance offers are hideous exercises in jargon and corporate speak.   

The person I was talking to wondered whether it was OK to use corporate-style language when marketing business-to-business, as opposed to business-to-consumer. I said no.

How come? Because people are human beings, even when they have their work heads on.

Whether we run multinational companies or spend our days reading ‘OK’ magazine and drowning in daytime telly, we invariably prefer clear, simple marketing communications that get the point across quickly and creatively without making  a meal of it. With no jargon and no convoluted corporate speak.

It doesn’t matter who you’re talking to. Good communication is about clarity, simplicity and brevity… every time.

(Thanks to http://www.sxc.hu/profile/barunpatro for the royalty-free, fee-free image)

I’m a stickler for punctuation, simply because without it the written word makes no sense. But I love the way people get creative with language. 

I discovered yesterday that ‘gravy’ apparently means ‘excellent’ these days if you’re under twenty five. Not so long ago ‘wicked’ was a wholly negative word but today even old folk use ‘wicked’ to describe something spectacularly, awesomely good.

And according to the nice young chap in Le Magasin, a posh cafe in Lewes, ‘epic’ is the perfect way to describe their cake selection. Which is, I have to admit, probably the finest in the known universe.

(Thanks to http://www.sxc.hu/profile/iprole for the royalty free cake image. Yum! )

If punctuation was the province of a load of fuddy duddies who insisted on following a bunch of boring old rules just for the sake of it, I might say yes. But without punctuation, the world suddenly makes much less sense.

In some cases leaving out punctuation, or getting it wrong, is downright dangerous. Far from being obsolete, it’s vital for clear, effective written communications.

This week’s New Scientist magazine pokes fun at a sign near London Bridge station that says, Narrow lanes do not overtake cyclists. Which is nonsense. But add a colon or hyphen and it’s suddenly a crystal clear instruction with road safety in mind: Narrow lanes –  Do not overtake cyclists. Or Narrow lanes: do not overtake cyclists.

Lynne Truss’s excellent book about punctuation, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, is another case in point. There’s a world of difference between the meaning of the phrase “Eats, shoots and leaves” and “Eats shoots and leaves”.

Here’s an example from her book, showing how different ways of punctuating the same statement turn its meaning upside down.

• A woman, without her man, is nothing
• A woman: without her, man is nothing

Punctuation isn’t difficult to learn. It’s mostly common sense and tends to mirror the way we speak. Not using it is just lazy.

If you’re in business and you’re foxed by punctuation, get a freelance copywriter on  the case and make sure your communications make sense. Or buy Lynne Truss’s book and get to grips with punctuating properly.

What is a strapline?

It’s a short statement that clarifies exactly what your business does, so people get the picture ‘at a glance’.

Where does a strapline go?

A strapline usually sits directly below a logo or company name.

Do I need a strapline?

It depends. If your business name / url already makes it crystal clear what you do, there’s no need. If it isn’t immediately clear, a strapline might be a good idea.

What should my strapline say?

Your strapline should make it obvious what your business does in as few words as possible, as engagingly as possible.

Examples of bad straplines? 

There’s no point creating something pretentious, airy fairy or overly ‘clever’. This is no time for bullshit. Believe in Better from Sky, For the Journey from Lloyds TSB and Today, Tomorrow, Toyota are embarrassingly fatuous displays of corporate nonsense.

My favourite strapline is a mini-masterpiece created by fellow  freelance copywriter Alastair Allday for skint.com: You’re broke. We’ll fix it. Which does exactly what it says on the tin as well as being witty, straightforward and as clear as a bell. Lovely.

Because this blog is home to more than 400 posts, it’s high time I went back to basics and re-covered all the good stuff I haven’t mentioned for ages.

Here’s a list of the subjects I’ll be resurrecting over the next few weeks, interspersed with the latest on-site SEO, SEM, SMM, direct marketing and communications news and views:

• integrated marketing
• direct marketing
• segmenting and targeting data
• creative targeting
• DIY marketing and SEO
• SEO basics
• B2B versus B2C marketing
• creating winning press releases
• writing with search engines in mind
• making the most of testimonials and case studies
• blogging to win more followers and please search engines
• copywriting and marketing ‘how to’ guides
• making a success of email marketing
• creating hard working autoresponder messages
• keeping your website fresh
• content quality control
• testing
• ebooks
• all about editing
• brand stuff
• media stuff
• the legal bit – marketing and distance selling rules, regulations and compliance
• formatting website content
• creating effective direct response adverts
• calls to action
• marketing and copywriting checklists
• getting your  meta data right – the code bit
• how to maximise sales conversion
• writing to a common denominator
• the ins and outs of key words / phrases
• insights into search engine algorithms
• the basics of link building
• long and short copy
• putting users first
• common sense data analysis
• link bait
• good, old fashioned print!
• direct mail
• direct response
• cross selling and up selling
• creating a winning newsletter
• reacting to trends
• mobile web
• plain English
• customer communications
• database marketing
• site updates
• marketing planning, tactics and strategies

(Thanks to http://www.sxc.hu/profile/onetwo for the excellent free image)

Google is using ‘social signals’ to help rank websites in the search results pages. But is it really a good idea? 

It makes sense for Google algorithms to take the majority’s likes and dislikes into account.

There’s about 70 million people in Britain. And 26 million-ish Twitter accounts. Many of us have two accounts, one for work and one for personal use. Spammers often have thousands of accounts each. So the number of British individuals using Twitter is probably a great deal lower than 26 million. And because 60% of Twitter users are aged 25-44, the social signals it generates aren’t representative from an age perspective either.

Facebook claims around 30 million unique UK users. That’s less than half the population. Apparently Facebook mostly attracts 25-34 year olds, making it even more age-restricted than Twitter.

Google+ apparently accounts for less than a million of us. If you’re talking statistical relevance, 1/70th of the population isn’t a representative sample either. Far from it.

Plenty of internet-savvy people have multiple social media accounts. I have four: one Facebook, two Twitter and one LinkedIn. Which must skew social signals even more.

Despite significant inroads by marketers, most of us use social media to communicate and interact with friends and colleagues. Social media marketers and SEOs, on the other hand, do their best to manipulate social media because they know Google is starting to take social signals into account.

When the majority of social signals are generated by Social Media Marketers, the end result isn’t representative of what most of us want. It just means we see what the biggest SMM spenders want us to see. If Google’s not careful they’ll end up delivering artificially skewed search results based on the preferences of the few, not the many.

(Thanks to http://www.sxc.hu/profile/TALUDA for the fab free image)

Here’s an example.

You could choose either green-widgets.com or greenwidgets.com. It doesn’t make any difference to search engines and it doesn’t affect your search positions. Either way, if you sell green widgets you’ll have an advantage over a business whose domain name doesn’t include the phrase ‘green widgets’.

The former, with hyphens, is easier for humans to read at a glance. But the crux of the matter, according to my tame senior SEO expert, is actually the comparative ease of verbal dissemination. It’s harder to get “Visit green hyphen widgets.com” across verbally without confusion than it is to say, “Visit greenwidgets.com”. Therefore, domain names without hyphens are best.

Simples!

Just follow the link…

All about Google Panda.