Pittsburgh SEO – SEM – SEA | Internet Marketing and Website Design | Blackball Online

We have been hearing for some time now about blog posting frequency and the value of traffic generation. Warm and fuzzy statistics and pretty pictures broken down to the nth iteration of data on how traffic goes up and blah, blah, blah. This is nothing new, but we never hear about the deterioration of content that happens when firms try to post beyond their means or what happens to reader abandonment rates as a result.

At Blackball Online Marketing we value your time and don’t want to produce useless and pointless posts for the sake of posting. The Internet is saturated with this kind of content already. There are those of you who may say this is a pointless post. LOL and that’s OK. We just want to say Thanks for reading our blog and ask you to sign up if you’re new.

I bet if the analytics crunchers did a study on the frequency of blog posting as it relates to the value of the posts they would find the content has a severely declining curve. Devalued content would then most assuredly lower the conversion rates; and the conversion rates are after all what we’re in business for.

If you're reading this on the Blackball Online Marketing Newsblog, please sign up. If you're reading this from another source please visit the Blackball Online Marketing Newsblog where we hope to give you quality content, not just to fill your inbox.

Blog Burnout

In my previous life I was a fanatical weight-lifter, and there was a saying; “you can train hard, and you can train long, but you can’t do both at the same time” (unless you were on steroids). But a bunch of us tried anyway and the body reacted, by doing of all things, “burning out.” So what does this have to do with blogging? Well, I’m seeing more and more of a similar thing, a lot of well designed business class blogs that have just burned out, nothing posted for months.

Unless your full-time position/job with an enterprise is as a Social Media articulator or reasonable facsimile there of, you will most certainly burn out and become very frustrated trying to come up with good quality blog posts day in and day out. Even if this is your full time job, it will be difficult.

I saw a post on a particular profession’s blog that went something like this “I have nothing to blog about, and I don’t know what to say” then the post went into a highly stylized “rant” about who knows what. I believe this individual was venting frustrations about not having anything to blog about. (Maybe that’s what I’m doing now.)

There’s more than a few blog gurus out there telling you to do this and do that to prevent blog burnout, but in a lot of cases it just comes down to time and I just can’t come up with anything of quality to say. Forcing the issue doesn’t make it any better.

Zenith’s tagline way-back-when was “Quality goes in before the name goes out.” The Zenith people said nothing about quantity, quality was job one.

I see blogging the same, quality, not quantity. If a post doesn’t make it for a few weeks or even longer for one reason or another, so be it. I just want to make sure it’s as relevant as I can get it at that time when the post does go up.

Marketing your Small Business on the Internet (Part 3) Start a Blogging Initiative

Pittsburgh, PA – By now almost everyone has heard the term Blog. If you haven’t here’s a brief rundown to get you up to speed.

“A blog (a contraction of the term "weblog")^[1] is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.”   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog

In the Dark Ages (10 years ago), The Internet was finding its way and people used forums, chat rooms, bulletin boards and email based communication networks. We have evolved and continue to do so. With the advent of Twitter,  Facebook,  MySpace, and other social media commentary, personal and business publication of reader material is easy and relatively cheap.

These days’ blogs have, in some cases, replaced websites with their ability to add pages easily and to maintain current data and info. To increase your rankings in search engines (SEO – Search Engine Optimization), and more importantly, to give customers a reason to come back to your site (repeat business and bookmarking); you need to keep the content on your site fresh and relevant.

Consider integrating a blog into your website. You can spend a few minutes a day writing for your blog, and you'll continually be adding fresh content to your site that search engines can crawl and your customers can read. I like to compare Google and the others to fires that burn. What do they burn? CONTENT! To keep your fire happy you add wood. To keep the search engines happy and looking on your site with favor, you add content.

So how can starting a blog help my business? Besides the previously mentioned points, here are a few ways businesses all over this fine planet have utilized the blog for all kinds of commercial uses.

• Brand Building – Make or enhance your Business profile
• Educational and Information sharing enhances your authoritative market niche as well
• Newsletter publication is easier than ever, you can archive your Newsletters now without much problem
• Publishing trade articles and whitepapers helps get your company recognized
• Social areas for employees to converse about carpools, soccer practice for the kids, a lunch venue, their new Avon product party, or whatever
• Political areas are touchy for business unless that is your business, but blogs have a profound reach in this arena too

The list could go on and on. The sky is truly the limit. Blog posts can be submitted to RSS feeds (a fantastic video here explaining RSS in plain English) and email subscription membership as well for all to see.

In this global marketplace every area of leverage should be exploited. You may find corporate strengths you never knew you had, or expose weaknesses that must be addressed. In any case this helps your business to compete and that is the main purpose. That is the power of blogging.

Thinking of starting a blog? Contact Us at Blackball Online for an evaluation of your business needs and a strategy for resolving them.

Pittsburgh, PA - Well, the inevitable has arrived. I joined Twitter. (@blackballonline) I had all kinds of objections and reservations that kept me from joining. One was that the site was not about business. I was dead wrong. What a fantastic way to join the throngs and communicate with many potential customers and business colleagues. I can now see the immense business value in this and if you have not joined yet, for your sake please do. I keep my Tweets almost exclusively to business as that is my purpose on Twitter.

Twitter was easy to join and they have a great starting video at http://www.twitter.com or this one which is more in depth at http://help.twitter.com/portal. Online Marketing and Advertising is all about the customer. Twitter facilitates this well when approaching it in a business sense allowing for a simple yet effective campaign to be crafted and carried out in a relatively short period of time.

To all those who prodded me, Thank you. Tweet away at me @blackballonline or visit our Pittsburgh SEO Company website or our Pittsburgh Internet Consulting Newsblog and please sign up for our email or rss subscription.

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/tribpm/s_624777.html

Above is a great article on the old Southside clock from the Pittsburgh Tribune Review - Trib PM edition - a little bit of Pittsburghana (if that is a word, kind of like Americana). Anyway, I thought I would break down the blog post name (Permalink) a little to help to clarify the conventions used to name blog posts and why they are important in the SEO for your site.

We want, ideally, for all our blog posts to rank in the search engines on their own. It lends to the credibility of our companies, our sites, and our posts directly. This is where the SEO comes in. In order to do that, the first thing the crawler sees is the blog post name i.e. the Permalink. Then the blog post title. Then the blog content itself. If anything blocks the crawler, it stops. The game is up and it only has that amount of information to go by. Take this fake post title for example:

http://www.blackballonline.com/?23456-ee.html

We've all seen links to blog posts like this above. The search engine is unable to crawl beyond the question mark (?) because special characters are not crawler friendly. So all the crawler sees is our site URL and no more. We've just blown a golden opportunity, and a lot of time to write a post nobody but the searcher inside our blog will ever see.

Back to the original post - http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/tribpm/s_624777.html

A breakdown of the Permalink (blog post name) above:

http://www.pittsburghlive.com -                            The URL
x -                                                                       a convention used by the Trib
pittsburghtrib -                                                     the name of the blog
news -                                                                 the category or tag the post is under
tribpm -                                                               the category or tag the post is under
s_624777.html -                                                  the filename

A note or two about the breakdown.
1.) news and tribpm could be tags or categories - I don't know the Trib's nomenclature for titling their blog posts.
2.) the filename s_624777.html - while this is fantastic for Google Blog Search  it says nothing about the post, or the keywords for that matter. When it comes to ranking this, where does Google index it? Under news obviously, but what kind of news? The search engines will have to search the content.

The moral of the story is: If we want Google to index our blog posts and rank for certain keywords, we should eliminate the guessing game and just create what are called pretty Permalinks and stick to these naming conventions. That's why we optimize them using SEO.