I've blogged about how to blog a few times now and I thought of another tip to use either to help you think of a blog topic or else to help you get more traffic to your blog. If you relate your blog topic to a current, hot topic then you should get more traffic.
What happens is, a topic starts getting blogged about (and shows up on Twitter) and Google then flags those keywords and is looking for all the content it can about that topic. Again... think like Google - you want to give what people are searching for. Google even keeps track of this information at the Google Trends page (see link below). This page is fun to watch throughout the day but you can just bookmark it and refer to it if you're looking for blog ideas. So as you submit content to the "blogosphere," it could get spidered quickly and could show up in results instantly. Just make sure you ping Google when you blog.
Some sites that help you keep an eye on the trending, hot topics:
You don't want to spam your posts with the latest keywords just to get traffic - although lots of people try to do that. You want to provide meaningful content that benefits the person reading it whenever you blog. Like this post, for instance. Do that and you'll have an audience and followers on Twitter.
To get good traffic from the search engines, your website needs to focus on the right keywords. To do it well is not difficult but you'll need to invest some time. No wait - not just "some" time but lots of time!
Here are the steps to SEO using keywords:
This list is not the details but the basic recipe for SEO and picking keywords. It's no secret and it makes sense. You want to stick with "white hat" (honest) tactics which are long-term. Don't expect results the next day or next week. It'll take time, so be patient - but do it now - that's the main thing. Plant those seeds now instead of waiting until "tomorrow."
To do SEO the right way, you need to select key pages (inside pages I'm talking about - not the home page) to target as what we call "landing pages." So you need to research which keywords are good and then match them up with specific pages on your website. Which keywords or key phrases are good? Good question!
Good keywords are the keywords that people are typing in when they do a search on search engines like Google. You want to match what they're typing in. To find those keywords / key phrases, you can use several good, online tools that are out there. These are the kinds of tools that we use.
So do your keyword research, find the best keywords with good search volume, then incorporate those keywords into page titles, meta tags, content and do cross linking within your site. After all that, go get links on other sites and directories using those keywords and target them to your landing pages...
Simple, right? Yeah, if you have the time, you can do SEO. We tell all our clients this. SEO isn't magic, it's just work.
I really don't mind blogging. I think it's fun, actually. I know a lot of people aren't like that though. They don't know where to start and see it as this huge task that's impossible to finish. If that's you, then don't worry. I'll give you some tips to tame that tiger.
We had a meeting with a client about 2 weeks ago now and we talked about blogging. Their hurdle was that for their industry, it was hard to come up with things to blog about because what they do is so technical. The information needed to create a blog would basically have to come from a scientist or engineer and there was no time for that. But then we asked if they had any old material and they remembered that they had a big presentation. We concluded that it could be broken up into smaller segments and repurposed for the blog. Done!
So when I found a few more good articles about this, I thought I should do a post. Blogging is pretty important if you want traffic to your website. People search for the strangest things and you're bound to catch those fish with the more content you push to your website. The page that has your blog should also have some kind of offer on it (like this page does - look in the left column!).
Here are the articles I found - all on the same site:
I do the last one a lot... wait, I'm doing it now! See?
So do some blogging already!
-Tony
