This is a guest post by Sarah Haydu, Digital Marketing Associate for CityVoter. CityVoter runs “best of” contests across the country where people vote online for their favorite local businesses and tell what makes their city special. You can check out their contests on the CityVoter website and get tips for small businesses on the CityVoter blog.

Blogs are a great tool to help your business develop a brand and create added value for your customers, but when done wrong the effort you put in does not grant the output that you would like to see. With so many tips on how best to blog out there, sometimes it is easier to know what not to do, and what doesn’t work, to find out what is best for your business.

1. Don’t decide you’re creating a blog and jump in head first.

While it’s great that you might be excited about your new venture with a blog, it is important to come up with a strategy before you start posting. How often will you update your content? What kind of content will you create?  What objectives do you want to accomplish? What kind of tone will your blog have? These are all important aspects to consider before you start a blog, so be sure to have a clear strategy even before the first post.

2. Don’t plan to post in your spare time.

Running a small business is incredibly time consuming, so if you only plan to post when you’re “free”, the blog will most likely never get updated. Instead, set up a blogging schedule and stick with it! Create a calendar with blog topics and specific dates that you would like to create and post each entry. Use a Google doc if more than one employee manages the company blog and be sure to update it as changes arise.

3. Don’t forget to drive traffic to your blog.

Publish blog posts to your Facebook and Twitter accounts to increase awareness and traffic. Tell your friends and personal network about posts that they might find interesting and encourage them to share it. This will help increase traffic and comments. Also, be sure to link to other shareable content and to anything on your webpage that you reference in the blog.

4. Don’t ignore comments.

It is important to drive readers to engage with your blog through comments and sharing with their network. If someone takes the time to comment, it means they are interested in what you have to say. Show them that you care as well by answering their questions and joining in on the conversation. If they share your blog post on Twitter for all of their followers to see, be sure to thank them with a tweet.

5. Don’t blog just for the sake of blogging.

Don’t clutter your readers’ newsfeeds with garbage just in an attempt to post content frequently. Set a content strategy to ensure you always have interesting ideas to share, and post those ideas at a pace that is sustainable for your business.

6. Don’t abandon the blog.

Are you opening up a new store? Is it a busy month for your business? One of the worst things for your blog and its followers is to bail on the blog with no explanation. It’s not the end of the world if you skip your blog posts for a week or two, but be sure to fill your readers in on why you are busy and tell them you’ll be back soon!

7. Don’t give up.

Perhaps the biggest and most important takeaway is to stick with it! Don’t assume that having a company blog is easy, but trust me when I say it will be worth the effort. It may take a while for your blog to gain traction and build in audience, but don’t give up and have fun!

Do you have other blogging don’ts (or do’s)? Let us know in the comments!

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Get Shareaholic for Your Blog!

Not all content was created equal. Besides grammar, creative writing, poetry and other forms of writing have few rules to follow. But when it comes to blogging, especially for your business, taking a technical approach and optimizing your content for search engines will pay dividends. Being attentive to keywords and formatting will drive more traffic – and qualified traffic – to your blog by leveraging the search terms used by your target audience.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s the practice of improving internal and external elements of your website in order to increase the visits you get from search engines. These internal and external elements are known as on-page and off-page SEO:

On-Page SEO: The content and structure of your blog post. This includes your keywords, URLS, meta tags, meta descriptions, page titles and more. We cover on-page SEO in this post.

Off-Page SEO: How search engines rank your site according to how other sites link to it.

Optimized content is shareable content. When optimized properly, search engines will reveal your content in the results for relevant search queries from your target audience. And because it’s relevant and useful, your readers will pass it along to others.

It’s All About Keywords

Most of on-page SEO has to do with including keywords on the various elements of your blog – things that can be seen by your readers and those crawled by search engines. SEOmoz provides a good example of where you include these keywords in your blog post. But choosing what keywords you want to include is the first step.

Using Google’s free keyword research tool, you can look up variations of the search phrases you want to rank for. In addition, research what keywords your competition targets. Check out this SEO tip from Dino Dogan in Social Media Examiner to learn how find competitor keywords by looking at page sources:

How to Optimize

WordPress makes it particularly easy for bloggers to make their posts SEO-friendly. Using a plugin like the All in One SEO Pack, you will have most of the areas you should enhance for on-page SEO all in area of your WordPress dashboard.

So if you haven’t done so already, install an SEO plugin like the All in One SEO pack and follow this checklist to ensure your content has all the right pieces in place.

1. Headline

Do you want to appeal to search engines or people? For maximum impact, you want to attract both, and tailoring your headline and your page title is how you’ll get there.

To appeal to readers, our blog post headline, or H1 text, is arguably the most important part of your post for because it’s your first impression. Ideally, your headline will be accurate, descriptive and include the keyword you are targeting. Shareaholic’s guide to blog post headlines should give you some ideas. Most of all, your headline should be catchy. The headline and a link to the blog post are usually all people see when it’s shared on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. So you’ve got to make it count.

But when it comes to headlines and search engines, you’ve got to remember that Google doesn’t laugh. A witty headline with rhymes, puns and a lack of an emphasis on keywords could go unrecognized by search engines and be a detriment to your posts’ rankings. This is why you’ve got to optimize your page title.

See how the Wall Street Journal optimizes their headlines and page titles for SEO. “Video Killed the Radio Czar” is a fun play on words for readers, but the much more literal page title “NPR CEO Resigns Over Hidden Video” appeals to search engines.

2. Page Title

Your headline may be the most important aspect of on-page SEO for humans, but the most important keyword element for search engines is your page title. Position your target keyword as the first word or early on in the page title for maximum impact.

3. Meta Description

The meta description is the phrase your potential readers under your page title in search results.

Make the most of this real estate by including the keywords in your description of your content.

4. Image File Name

Image search traffic can be a significant source of visits. Image filenames are closely considered in these rankings, so be sure to incorporate your keyword term or phrase in your image file name.

6. Alt Attributes

Include keywords in your image alt attributes to enhance your rankings for image search. You can easily do this in WordPress’ media upload interface. 

7. Link Back to Old Posts

Familiarize your audience with your posts by referring to your past content often. Maybe a reader missed your blog post before, but you can gain pageviews for that content now with an internal link. Internal linking also lets search engines know you are linking to a page about a specific top, enhancing the relationship between your page and the right keyword.

8. Customize Your URLs

 Your URL is yet another place you can include your keywords. If you’re using the default permalink setting in WordPress, your URLs will look something like this: http://mysite.com/blog/?p=42 But that garbage won’t help your rankings!

In your WordPress dashboard, go to Settings -> Permalinks and select the structure that allows you to include your keywords in the URL.

Before you hit publish on your next post, tailor the URL so it uses your keywords.

­While it may seem tedious to go through all these details for every single blog post, well-optimized content is the gift that keeps on giving. The SEO effort you put in now will attract qualified traffic to your posts for months – even years – to come.

How do you make sure your content is optimized for SEO? Let us know in the comments!

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Want to optimize your content to get even more visitors? Try Shareaholic.

Get Shareaholic for Your Blog!

It seems like it’s almost common business blogging advice nowadays: When it comes to content, don’t write about yourself. Write about things that interest your target audience. How-to articles, lists of tips and lists of resources are all great ways to do this, and are commonly recommended. But what we could all use are some vivid examples of what this looks like in action.

Although I honestly haven’t tried an online dating site myself, I’ve got plenty of friends who’ve taken the leap and developed brand loyalty for these social networks – so much so that they share some pretty great blog posts from the sites with me from time to time. These websites must be doing something right with their blogging, as their content is clearly shareable.

How can you replicate this shareability and develop brand loyalty for your company? See how several dating sites are succeeding.

1. HowAboutWe.com

Lesson: Have quality writing, and don’t make it about you!

The How About We blog is full one thing missing from a lot of online content: good writing. Among a sea of overly-abbreviated crap smattered with emoticons, the How About We blog articulates dating advice in a funny, thoughtful and well-spoken way.  It’s written with its core audience of 20-something singles in mind and always offers timely content. Whether it’s New Years Eve dating tips or 2012 dating resolutions, the blog is sure to entertain. Most of all, they don’t talk about themeselves – they talk about the things their core audience can relate to.

2. OKCupid

Lesson: Use your data to create awesome content, and offer recommendations based on statistics.

It’s a data explosion! Machines, software, apps and websites all generate a TON of data, and if your company tracks it properly, this could unlock a ton of content creation and PR opportunities. Showing statistics is a fantastic way to position yourself as an expert, which is particularly helpful for B2B content.

OKCupid’s blog is a B2C spin on this. Through questionaires, OK Cupid collects metrics on people’s points of view when it comes to relationships and err…. “dating.” On the OK Trends blog, they deliver the findings through helpful word clouds and graphs, positioning the data based on demographics. What do Christians like to do on first dates? What do beer drinkers prefer when it comes to dating versus those who don’t like beer? This blog let’s you know their statistical findings and gives explicit takeaways.

3. Match.com

Lesson: Make your content related to what you do, but not necessarily about that topic.

Match.com does something really creative with their blog – they post tons of recipes for home-cooked date night meals. This is a perfect idea, as many people are Googling for that information anyway. Although I love the creativity here, I think they could do a little bit better of a job tying it back to their main purpose – they aren’t Recipes.com afterall. Just an introduction paragraph explaining that it’s a date-night recipe recommendation could go a long way. Or, they could change up the headline and make it a weekly special (think: Thursday’s Date Night Recipe: Butternut Squash Ravioli) Nevertheless, the content that they offer is valuable to their target audience without being selfishly focused just on what they do, and that’s something we can all fall in love with.

In addition to recipe recommendations, Match shows couple success stories and dating tips.

4. Zoosk

Lesson: Tell your customers’ stories.

Case studies show the human face of your brand. This works just as well for B2B software companies showing off customer success stories as it does for Zoosk, who shows off successful matches on their blog. How can you make this work for your company?

5. eHarmony

Lesson: Call in the experts.

eHarmony’s dating advice blog features guest posts from book authors and dating coaches. Sprinkling in an outside expert opinion along with posts from your company adds relevance and a fresh perspective to your blog. You’re still building a rep as a thought leader by curating this content, even if it doesn’t directly come from you. And the fact that the content is dating advice means that they’re being helpful and creating trust before the sale. That’s how it’s done.

What company blogs do you admire? Share your favorites in the comments!

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One more lesson: Want to make your content easy to share and get more visitors?

Get Shareaholic for Your Blog!