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Blogging and SEO – Shelby Says

by Shelby Sapusek on August 3, 2011

image of blogging and seo

When Jim and I presented She Said, He Said Live for the first time at WordCamp Chicago last weekend, we had an interesting discussion with audience members about blogging and search engine optimization (SEO). We liked the conversation so much that we decided to incorporate it as a topic for this week’s #shehechat (Thursday, 8 p.m. CST on Twitter).

I don’t know SEO

I’m not even close to being an SEO expert. However, I’m an editor for this blog so I’ve been determined to learn as much about it as I can. I work mostly with WordPress and I’ve found that, compared to other publishing platforms, this one is more tailored to achieving acceptable SEO.

WordPress builds SEO-centricity into its design. If you aren’t using a theme or plugin that adds options for categories, tags and meta descriptions, you are missing the SEO train. But it’s about more than just filling in those boxes. It matters what you put in them and that is sometimes why I struggle.

I subscribe to Scribe

In our She Said, He Said Live presentation, I said that my favorite WordPress plugin was Scribe SEO (affiliate link) It’s no accident that my favorite plugin is focused on something that I don’t know much about. The reality is that it’s the most helpful to me so that’s why I picked it.

Scribe reminds me to fill in those custom title tag and meta data boxes. It suggests that maybe if I added a hyperlink to my content, the SEO would be better. It can even suggest different words to add into the meta data. These might be simple things, but Scribe is a tool I’ve found useful as I learn about SEO.

I write differently for the web

While I still have a lot to learn, I have figured one big thing out. I’ve mentioned that I have a long background in print media. Well, I can say that the way reporters write for print is not the way they should be writing for the web. A question came up during our presentation as to why newspapers’ websites have such bad SEO. I answered that it was because they were too often copying and pasting content from their print version onto their websites word for word.

Writing for the web is just different. To give just one example, take a basic headline I’ve seen a thousand times in different newspapers around the nation: “Popular downtown club to close this month.” Well, that’s very nice for your print subscribers who might have been following the story over a period of time, but do you think Google is going to pick that up in a search? A good web editor might change it to something like: “Downtown Milwaukee club Anonymous to close Aug. 31.” Do you see the difference? Google now has a city, venue name and date. Google likes.

Look what I’ve done

As much as I don’t know about SEO, think about what I’ve done in this post. I’m going to let Jim take care of the SEO work, but I can pick out these key words for the meta data: SEO, blogging, WordPress and Google. Plus, I have an affiliate link (gasp) to Scribe SEO. I bet Google will like.

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Why building a better mousetrap will increase your sales

by JimRaffel on July 5, 2011

image of increasing sales

The relaunch of our ProofPass.com site has taught and reinforced a number of business lessons and principles for me over the last month. The new ProofPass.com is an enhanced and improved version of the original product/service. In other words, we built a better mousetrap and it’s getting noticed. One way it’s getting noticed is the affiliate marketing program I’ve offered to set up for a select few business associates. These folks believe enough in the new ProofPass.com that they want to begin recommending it to their clients and associates.

I’ve observed the same behavior in myself. You may have noticed that I’ve changed around the right hand sidebar on this site a bit over the last couple of weeks. I decided to stop promoting some of my affiliate relationships with that prime real estate because they were not generating revenue to justify the exposure. The question became how to find programs that I was willing to promote.

Finding needles in the haystack

One area I’ve done pretty well with is promoting replacement batteries for the htc EVO phone I carry. I decided to search the ShareASale merchant directory for a mobile phone battery provider I could promote. It ended up taking the better part of a few hours. I took the time to visit each site and search for ‘htc EVO battery.’ I settled on Batteries.com after I rated each site on these three factors:

1. The ease with which I was able to initiate that search.
2. The pertinence of the results that search generated.
3. The overall look and feel of the website.

Similarly, I’ve decided to finally get a professional logo done for this site. I once again searched the ShareASale merchant directory. This evaluation was a bit different. I ran a few of the better looking sites all the way through the process up to the point where I needed to purchase. At the end of that evaluation process, I was happiest with LogoMojo.com and willingly entered by credit card information. Soon, you’ll see the new logo and a post sharing the process in greater detail.

People evaluate you every day

Prior to our re-release of ProofPass.com on June 1, the site and service had become kind of stale. While still a useful offering, nothing had changed visually in almost two years. Folks are constantly looking at and evaluating your product and service offering. There is no resting on your laurels in the modern business world. Once you get to the top, you have to keep innovating and improving. If you do, your audience will continue to notice you and promote you. If you don’t, you’ll die a not so slow death.

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Affiliate Marketing: I’m done being bashful about it

April 14, 2011
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This post and tomorrow’s “Use affiliate links, but please use them honestly” by Shelby Sapusek are part of our ongoing “She said, He said” series. Hello, my name is Jim and I’m an affiliate marketer. There, step one is out of the way. Eleven more to go. What is affiliate marketing? First, in case you are not [...]

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Why communities like Third Tribe Marketing are worth the cost

February 15, 2011

Recently, a partner and I were trying to decide which screen casting product to purchase for a community we are building. We both knew of ScreenFlow and Camtasia, but needed to decide which to review and ultimately purchase. I remembered a conversation thread in Third Tribe Marketing (affiliate link) about this subject. So, Google or [...]

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Establishing Online Authority

December 7, 2010

After presenting Selling at (and to) a Higher Level for the first time last week, many of the audience followup questions centered around establishing online authority. I’m going to run through the steps I have used to increase traffic on this site, over at ColorMetrix and on Qip.com, which we recently sold for tens of [...]

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Why Images In Posts Work

August 16, 2010

Recently, I was scrolling through Avinash Kaushik’s Win Big With Web Analytics: Eliminate Data & Eschew Fake Proxies when it hit me why images in posts work. First, I don’t pick which Avinash posts to read by title. He only writes a few posts each month so I skim each one for value (also his [...]

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Marketing 101: Micro Campaigns Execution

July 28, 2010

Yesterday I discussed the strategy behind micro marketing campaigns. Today I’ll dig into the nuts and bolts of how I execute these events. Your tools and milage may vary but the concepts should be basically the same. So much for yesterday’s Why, here’s the How. Mining for contacts. For your first campaign, I recommend searching [...]

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Scribe SEO Copy Writing Made Easy

May 8, 2010

I’ve written about the Scribe SEO copy writing tool before. It’s a great service put out by Brian Clark founder of CopyBlogger and numerous other successful ventures like Third Tribe Marketing and the Thesis Theme. Over the last few months the early adopters of Scribe have helped identify the rough edges and the development team [...]

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Social Media Is Killing Traditional Sales

March 19, 2010

The traditional sales prospecting model is becoming increasingly ineffective over time. Five times in less than two weeks I have been solicited by voice mail message or email. Wait, by the same person! This is downright annoying. Obviously I have the tools to filter this noise out of my communications stream and I have. It [...]

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