Pittsburgh SEO Etiquette For Blog Commenting

Note To Self: Be A Better Neighbor On The Web

Blog commenting spam still carries weight in the rankings

It would cease to be such a prolific tactic for comment spammers if it didn’t. Below are a few points about being a better citizen of the digital community. We are not immune to these either. We are identifying these traits and making concerted efforts to be better citizens and neighbors of the digital world.

Refrain from Hijacking the Conversation

Stay On Topic. If there is some other direction you would like to explore with a blog topic, write about it yourself. We see it all the time; blog comments that hijack the conversation of a well written post. It has become so commonplace that few even take notice. It’s the ADD of the Internet. Someone creates an awesome post, then the comments turn into “look at me”, “look at our post”, “our post is better”, or they manipulate the conversation to suite their own ends. Pure laziness.

Solid debate drives ingenuity

Respect yourself enough to read the post you are commenting on. This way you don’t end up looking foolish for getting the whole point mixed up. Or worse yet, parroting points the author has already made. Take the time to read the post. Your reputation and standing in the community will benefit. If you have a genuine beef with the writers’ post or opinions, simply state it. That’s the beauty of the Internet; it is a celebration of diversity and like minded people all in one.

With all the aggregating websites designed to produce and repurpose content out there, the Internet is becoming filled with trash. Useless sites spewing out endless volumes of unreadable and duplicate content for the sake of links and ads are everywhere. The search engines are finally looking and penalizing these sites. Kudos to them for identifying the problem and taking action.

Value Your Own Credibility

This boils down to reputation management in my eyes. If you continuously spam posts with “Well Done” and “Nice Site” comments it shows weakness in your game. It says to anyone who reads, writes, or administers blogs that you just are an also ran tagging along and riding the wave of their toil and sweat. Bloggers will react and either delete your comments through a spam filter or report you to comment spam reporting sites to do the whole blogging community a service.

Give Credit Where Credit is Due

Want to increase your online status and credibility? Link to the original post that stirred your creative juices. Mention the author or blog site that made you pause and think of a better mousetrap. Then you can comment on the original blog in a meaningful and substantive way. You could even add a link like this one for the Yoast.com article on spamming blog comments with anonymity that became the trigger for this article.

At Blackball Online Marketing we try to inform, infuse, and enlighten.  We have fun; it’s in our mission statement. Pittsburgh Internet Marketing for small business is our game.

Overcoming 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 way, 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.

At Blackball Online Marketing we offer Pittsburgh Internet Consulting for overcoming blog burnout. Option B is to have one of our writers fill in some of those topics from a different perspective. Click or Call.

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.