The Pareto Principle (“80/20 Rule”) definitely applies to search engine optimization (SEO). If you’re writing about something very specific, these simple steps will help your blog posts show up for related searches on Google and Bing.

Let’s begin at the beginning:

The article title. Make sure you use the main keywords for your article in the title. It’s surprising how many people never do this. They will write a really intelligent piece then give it a title that is neither descriptive or search engine-friendly.

The permalink. Make sure your blog is using the article title as part of the URL. It should look like:

mysite.com/keywords-about-article

Not:

mysite.com/p=?123

We use the SEO Slugs plugin to remove unnecessary words like “the” and “a.” WordPress makes it easy to making other changes to the permalink. Google’s Matt Cutts suggested this idea a couple years ago.

Change the permalink slightly to cover other possible search phrases. The example I use in this video shows the title as “Change a Tire on a Yugo” but I tweaked the permalink to read “changing-tire-yugo” so that the article would be likely to show up for the searches “changing a tire” and “change a tire.”

For more details see Matt Cutts presentation at WordCamp 2009.

The article content. Simple. Make a point to use the keyword phrase a couple times, but don’t overdo it. Write for humans first, search engines second.

Blog categories. Using relevant keywords for your blog categories is also a good idea. Categories have their own “archive” pages with permalinks too.

Post tags. Again, basic stuff, but be sure to tag your blog post with all relevant terms. Tags, like categories, have archive pages that get crawled by the search engine bots.

Extra Credit

WordPress is pretty seo-friendly as is, but using a plugin like All in One SEO will allow for a little more tuning. You can create yet another variation of the title for the “TITLE TAG.” The title tag is what shows at the top of the browser for the page you are seeing. The title tag is also the headline that shows up as a link on search engine results pages. Here is another opportunity to use a plural version of the keyword instead of singular, past tense instead of present, etc.

The “Meta Description” shows up under the headline on search engine results pages. Search engines don’t factor this into how pages are ranked in results. But, this text can help “sell the click.” If no description is present Google will pull select snippets of text from the page. Robots don’t write as well as humans.

Finally, if you got ‘em, and photos and videos. Either can show up separately as results on search pages.

I’ve seen amazing results using nothing but these simple steps. This especially true when content is written on a very specific topic, or for a very specific audience. That’s a subject for another post.

I went to Carolina Connect 2011 and got to see a good keynote by Peter Shankman. I turned on the Flip camera for the last few minutes of Q&A and got some insights from Peter about the complementary nature of SEO and social media. His point was that SEO helps the searcher find you but social media, in the form of reviews and recommendations, is what ultimately will persuade prospects to engage with your brand, or buy what you’re selling.

Of course, that is correct, and in a way nothing new. “Social proof” in the form of referrals, word-of-mouth, and customer testimonials has existed since people started selling stuff. Good marketers and salespeople began using social proof long before there was an Internet. As Peter put it creating customers who will spread the word “goes back to customer service” in the broadest sense of the term.

Shankman’s talk was definitely the highlight of the event.

P.S. We are long-time fans of HARO (see below) and regularly submit pitches for articles. Just last week we got a call from Inc. magazine to confirm a quote from us. Next issue?

More about Peter Shankman from the event website:

Peter Shankman is perhaps best known for Help A Reporter Out (HARO), one of the fastest-growing social media services in North America, which he founded in 2008. Every day, HARO brings nearly 30,000 reporters and bloggers and more than 100,000 news sources together with thousands of small businesses to tell their stories, promote their brands and sell their products and services.

Shankman is the author of Can We Do That?! Outrageous PR Stunts That Work – and Why Your Company Needs Them (Wiley and Sons 2006). His second book, Customer Service: New Rules for a Social-Enabled World (Que Biz-Tech 2010), comes out later this year, revealing how to make the most of social and viral media in customer service.

SEO Braintrust shares how to get better rankings in just one day.

Do easy stuff first. Find and fix problems before optimizing what’s already there. Start at core of the website and work out.

Create small units of work with milestones. This helps to keep everyone motivated. The units should be stand alone as much as possible, and don’t make them up as you go.

Failure leads to learning, and don’t get hung up on perfection.

Start with a 4 x 4 framework.

• Technical- including software, domain, URL’s, and robots
• On-Page- including title, description, duplication, and thin content
• On-Site- including spidering/indexing, broken links, link text, and wasted page rank
• Off-Site- and “bad” links, broken links, page rank bleeds, and inbound links

Visit SEO Braintrust to see the presentation.

1. Trying To Optimize A Page For More Than One Keyword

Optimizing a page for more than keyword is a simple and common mistake to make. Once you have your list of keywords that you want to rank for, you may have started sprinkling them liberally all over your website. That’s the wrong way to go though – You end up in a world where all of your pages are competing with each other in the search engine’s eyes to be the most important page on your site for that keyword. Usually in that situation, none of them win and you still won’t rank. Search rankings aren’t just about a website doing well, it’s about a specific page ranking well for a keyword, and that page being a good destination for people interested in that keyword phrase.

For a simple exercise on this front, sit back and look at your page, and ask yourself honestly, “What keyword is this page good for? How good is it compared to other pages on that keyword?” Your keyword strategy will reveal itself from there. If there’s more than one keyword phrase revealed, you may be looking at two different pages that were mashed into one.

Remember: One page, one keyword phrase.

Read the whole article at HubSpot

Web design is hard. Years ago web designers had to make some tough choices when it came to typography on websites. You couldn’t just use any font you wanted for headlines or body text because unless the viewers of your site had the same fonts loaded on their machines they would get substitutes. And who knows what that would look like. So you chose from a short list of “web safe” fonts, standard fonts that everyone should have. If you insisted on controlling the fonts you could use graphics instead, but search engines can’t “read” images. Later, new ways of coding web pages (stylesheets) made it possible to use text for search engines and graphics for viewers, but it takes time to load images and fast loading pages are now an important SEO factor. More recently the use of Flash to replace text via some fancy coding solved most of those issues, and kept the text flexible. But now there’s something even better…

Google has created a Font Directory where anyone can access a growing list of fancy fonts. So a designer can code a website and specify any font in Google’s Font Directory and the viewer’s browser will go get that font to display it on the page. The only downside I see right now is that the number of fonts is rather limited, but it seems like a move in the right direction. According to Google “all fonts in the directory are available for use on your website under an open source license and are served by Google servers.” Maybe they can change that policy or also add premium fonts eventually. Or maybe they are just doing this to make indexing the World’s information easier. Surely, no one cares more about “search engine optimization” (SEO) than the big G.

Anyone using the Font Directory yet?

Google Font Directory

Google Font Previewer

This is a version of the blog post checklist our writers use when they submit an article for one of our clients’ sites. The only items I have omitted are related to things that are part of our internal work flow. I’m giving it all away! Definitely watch the video because some of these items need explaining. We’ll do some more focused videos later where we can dive deep into things writing meta descriptions and title tags that can help “win the click” on the search engine results pages.

We use a checklist because we want to keep the quality consistently high, from writer to writer, blog to blog, post to post. It’s important that your business is regularly producing high quality content using SEO best practices. Doesn’t matter if the business is plumbing, a restaurant, or shoe store. Modern marketing means creating relevant media for your audience. If this type of blogging seems like more work than you want to do for your marketing program talk to us. This is what we do.

Check out the checklist below.

You can copy and paste it into Word for a printer friendly version. As always, if you have any questions please leave them in the comments and we’ll do our best to help.

SEO Blog Post Writing Checklist

Topic

Keyword Research

Title / Headline

Linking

Word Count

Meta Description

Tags & Meta Keywords

I recently spoke to the incoming class at the business incubator here in Asheville about creating content to promote their businesses. This video shows the mind map I used in that talk. There are a lot of benefits to creating content for your site, no matter type of business you have. The ideas presented here are things anyone can do to get started.

Download the entire interactive SEO Content Creation mind map.

Let me know if you want info on a particular topic.

As part of our SEO efforts we write content for the blogs of our small business clients. This is how we make sure our bloggers are using the same keywords that people are searching for. If you have any questions please leave them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them. Thanks!