July 13, 2009

How to do a good blog: Step 1

There are a lot of reasons to have a blog.

A blog can make your large business, or individuals in your business seem more personal… more “real”, and people like to do business wit people they feel they know.

A blog can drive communication and feedback (though this happens less often that a lot of bloggers might have you believe.)

A blog can be a really easy way to get your small business on the web.  It can make you seem bigger.

It can be a spot to speak your mind on your hobbies, interests or gripes.

More often than not however, people tend to use a blog to drive more traffic.  This might happen due to a combination of the reasons stated above.  But it also likely includes a plan for SEO.

Blogs are very powerful for SEO for a couple of key reasons.  They first reason is that blog content is very conversational in tone.  It uses a lot of words you may never use in your marketing web site.  This provides for a “Long Tail.”

Here’s the concept of the Long Tail:

Imagine you sell a diet pills that increases energy.

You make a web site that ways “More energy”  “Lose weight”, and thins like that.  You start to get traffic for these phrases (but a LOT of people are competing for them.)

Then you start to blog about successful customers.  You write about “Susan”, who was heavy, and highly depressed.  You write about how the product changed her life.  Guess what happens… A few months later you are shocked to find that 7% of the traffic to your site is people coming in because they were looking for ways to deal with “depression.”

The Long tail means that if you can get enough of these types of people for phrases like “depression”, or other similar topics, that that traffic can actually combine, and begin to eclipse the traffic for “weight loss.”

But the Long Tail is only one aspect of SEO.  Blogs are great for SEO for lots of other reasons.  Over the next several days I am going to be writing several of these reasons, and steps to do them right.  But today we start with step 1: Your Domain Name.

Domain names:

Unless you are a huge brand like Nike or Starbucks, people are probably not searching for your comapny name.  They are likely searcing for the product or service you provide (sports shoes, or coffee.)

One of the most important pieces of good SEO is your domain name.  You need to ask yourself when you start our blog, “Will people search for my company, or my product or service?”  Also, what will the customer really be searching for?  Sometimes we choose very generic phrases like “Fitness Gym”, when a customer will never find what they want if the look for that… they will need to look for “Utah Fitness Gym”, or “Orem Fitness Gym.”

Once you decide what people will likely look for, seriously consider having your blog use that domain name, rather than your company name.  UtahFitnessGymBlog.com will rank much better than blog.Fitnesscorp.com for a search for “Utah Fitness Gym.”

Also, think about how you and others search when deciding what you want to rank well for.  Most people type a search in to google and get too many results.  So they refine the search by adding a word or two.  Then a bit more, and a bit more.  It’s on that 3-5th search that ou have narrowed things enough to be useful.  So who is your target customer, and what do they look for on that third, fourth, or fifth search?

Get a domain name that fits with that.

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