Content is the foundation of SEO.

The purpose of an SEO campaign is to drive visitors to your website. But why do you want to do that? So they can see your content, of course.

• Without content, you don’t have a website.
• With lousy content (visually poor, grammatical errors, keyword stuffing, lack of organization) you have a website that chases people  away.
• With ineffective content you have a website that fails to convert visitors into paying customers.
• With effective content your website becomes a powerful sales tool.

But that’s not the only kind of content that’s important. You may not have realized it, but you have off-site content, too. That’s content in other places that helps promote your brand and direct potential customers to your website. What kind of content is that specifically? How about this:

• Articles and white papers posted on other sites.
• Online press releases.
• An email newsletter. (Sign up for ours!)
• Blog posts you write that are syndicated at one or more other blogs.
• Twitter mentions.
• Mentions at other social media like Facebook, Google+, Delicious, Digg, FriendFeed, StumbleUpon, MerchantCircle, LinkedIn and others.
• Mentions and links from other websites related to yours.

Is your content good enough for effective SEO?

How good is the copy on your site? You have to start there because everything else drives people to your on-site copy. Is it unique? Does it provide value by providing non-obvious information and answering questions? Is it interesting to read? Is it literate? Does it funnel visitors toward a buying decision? If not, have you considered hiring a professional copywriter?

Do you have the necessary off-site copy? This is one of the most forgotten factors in SEO. You need a strong presence in as many off-site places as possible to build your link popularity and to drive more visitors to your website.

Once you’ve considered all that, you may decide you need professional help with your SEO. If so, talk to us.

Leverage Your Blog

Once you have a blog, you can easily leverage it to spread your brand, gain you authority in your field, and greatly improve your visibility on the Internet. Here are six reasons a blog will pay you back all out of proportion to the effort it takes to maintain it.

1. Interact with clients & prospects. Write provocative posts that generate comments and questions. You can respond and establish both authority and accessibility at the same time.
2. Gain Directory Links. You can list your blog in perhaps two dozen blog directories. If your blog is hosted on your website domain (it should be!) then all those links  help your website’s link popularity. See Bloggapedia, Blogarama,  Technorati, and BlogHub.
3. Syndication Possibilities – other blogs may re-post your blog posts for their readers, dramatically extending your range of influence. Plus you get backlinks that hepl your website rankings.
4. Social Media Exposure — You can set up your blog so every post automatically gets listed on your Facebook Fan Page. The preiodic updates there keep your fans engaged. You can also easily post a link to your blog post at other social media sites: Delicious, Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, LinkedIn, Merchant Circle and so forth. That expands your reach and also generates backlinks.
5. Real Time Exposure via Twitter. Tweet each blog post as you publish it to get the word out to your followers. Others interested in what you do will find you and follow you. You can see ours here.
6. You can even push your blog out on Kindle and actually earn money when people subscribe to it! (Look up the Rank Magic Blog on your Kindle for a good example.)

Yes, having a blog takes a certain amount of discipline to write at least one good post a month, but it can rally pay off in your branding and your visibility on the web. We can share some time-saving and labor-saving ideas that we’ve put into practice for our own blog. Call and ask how we can help.

To Rank Magic Clients —

Thanks for having us provide you with Search Engine Optimization services. Now that you’ve taken care of your website ranking needs with a trusted SEO professional, it’s time to look at your software needs. Are you getting the most out of Office 2010? Or perhaps you’re about to upgrade from an earlier version? Has Rank Magic suggested you add a blog to your website? Does your small business need to share files within your team? Are your company documents polished and professional? Do you need help creating a PowerPoint presentation? Does your team need to share your calendar? Would you like help setting up a customer relationship management system without it being a chore?

If any of this rings true, or if this list helped you identify even more needs, turn these tasks over to a trusted Software Coaching firm. From Outlook and Excel to DropBox and Constant Contact, Home & Office Computer Training has been taking great care of my clients for years. Now they’ve created a spin-off company that focuses on the specific needs of the small business owner, called Right Click Advantage.

Their software coaches are friendly and personable as well as skilled, patient, and up to speed on the latest Windows, Mac and Android tech tools for your business.

Because of your relationship with Rank Magic, you’ve now earned a distinct advantage – the Lucky 7 Advantage. Give Right Click Advantage a call and not only will you receive a free phone consult, but when you do meet with them in their comfortable coaching center, clients of Rank Magic enjoy a 7% Discount. All you need to do is mention that you’re a client of ours, or if you’re filling out a registration form, you can enter the Code TRELOAR. You’ll automatically receive a reduced rate for all of your business software coaching needs.

Hubspot’s companion to their Website Grader is Blog Grader. Like Website Grader, it gives you a percentage grade and then breaks down your analysis by components such as these:

• a comparative rank (against all the blogs they’ve analyzed
• estimated traffic rank
• SEO link authority
• where your blog is hosted
• subscribability (how easy it is for people to subscribe to your blog)
• analysis of individual posts
  • title tags
  • meta description tags
  • posting frequency
  • post length (word count)
  • links per post
  • images per post

Blog Grader makes suggestions about all of these things to help you improve your blog. If you blog, I recommend you get your blog graded.

We’ve written a lot in the past about the importance of link popularity for good search engine rankings. Link popularity counts even more heavily in Google than in the other search engines and it’s not something you can ignore. Links from a web site’s Helpful Resources page are good, but the best links are those that are embedded within a content rich paragraph related to your business. Couple that with the recent increased emphasis by Google on timely information from social networking sources like Twitter and blogs, and you have the basis for a new business model.

There’s a savvy little company called Net-Writers that’s been getting some impressive results with a niche service to help clients gain SEO traction by leveraging the power of this kind of relevant content. They build numerous inbound content-relevant, keyword-rich links by creating and publishing multiple blog posts for a client.  They start with 50 blog posts, each one with three keyword-rich links pointing to the page on their client’s site that’s optimized for them. This can be a powerful technique to supplement the on-page SEO and traditional link building we do at Rank Magic.

The copy they create won’t win prizes for style but it is professionally written and won’t embarrass their clients. This content is also totally controlled, which means it can be edited or taken down if the client has any accuracy or style issues with it.

Net Writers guarantees positive results, too, which they define as an improvement in your ranking position for your keywords. I haven’t seen the wording of that guarantee so I don’t know if it’s specific to Google or Yahoo or Bing, how much of a ranking improvement they promise, or whether they promise improvement on all of your targeted keywords. What I can say, though, is that I’m satisfied their approach works.

Net-Writers’ approach to link building isn’t Black Hat SEO, but it’s not totally White Hat SEO either; I think we need a new category of Gray Hat SEO. That’s because these blog posts are designed to feed keyword-rich links to the search engines, and aren’t really designed to drive traffic to your site in and of themselves. Will search engines eventually learn to detect this technique and lower the value of the links it generates? I doubt it. These are real blog posts, not fakes, and distinguishing them from totally innocent blog posts that just happen to link to a web site would be difficult or impossible. Only time will tell about that, but for now, and for many  businesses, this approach should realize measurable benefits.

Google Blog Search (now in Beta) provides search results from millions of feed-enabled blogs. Users can search for blogs or blog posts, and can narrow their searches by dates and more. We’ll soon be working to make sure the Rank Magic blog is listed. In the meantime, this is still a great source to find blogs and blog posts on subjects that interest you.

People have been asking lately if they should put their blog on a different IP address from their main web site, which would entail the blog having a different domain name from the main web site. Presumably the reason they’d want to do that is in the hopes of links back to their web site counting more heavily if the search engines think the blog is really unrelated to the web site.

Whether links from external web sites count more than internal links within your own web site has been a source of confusion, but in fact, all links count. There’s no reason to worry about different domain names unless you’re trying to fool people (or the search engines). From an SEO perspective, trying to fool search engines is a very, very bad practice.

Most companies include their blog as part of their own web site — as we do here at Rank Magic. In our case, the blog is atwww.rankmagic.com/blog. Another approach, equally valid, would be to set up a subdomain so the blog would be at blog.yourdomain.com. Either way is fine for both your visitors and the search engines.

Social media web sites offer some great opportunities for relevant backlinks to your website. The more of those you have, the better your reputation with the search engines, and the better that is, the higher you’ll rank.

New web site BackLinkSpot.com provides a way to find blogs on topics you search for. You can enter some of your keywords and find a large number of blogs that are more or less related to your business. If those blogs allow guests to respond to postings, go ahead and do so. Be sure to include a link back to the most relevant page on your web site for the topic you’re writing about.

Depending on your search terms, this may take a bit of time, but once you’ve found some really good and relevant blogf, you can bookmark them and visit them again and again.