Two Way Conversation

You know you need to have one, but where should you put it? That question comes up frequently in the SEO Chat forums as well. There’s really only three possible places: directly on your company’s website, hosted on a subdomain, or set up on an external blogging platform such as Blogger or WordPress.

Of these three options, the last one is the worst, from an SEO standpoint. You’re trying to attract people to your website. Visitors follow content. Good content encourages linking, which makes you more visible in the search engines. A properly-maintained blog is a goldmine of regularly-updated niche content. You want that content working directly for your own website and building link juice by being ON the site itself. Either of the first two options will do that. Anything else just multiplies the amount of work you need to do.

So now that you have a blog, you need to promote it. There’s a number of ways to do this, but they all start with doing your homework. And by homework, I mean keyword research. Pick the long-tail keywords you want to target. Now do some more homework, so that the posts you write for your blog are the ultimate resources online for your niche topics.
But it doesn’t stop there. Who wants to have a one-way conversation? When visitors comment on your posts, be sure to comment back. Encourage thoughtful conversation. Please feel free to go further than that. You’re probably not the only person blogging on your topic. Find your niche’s well-respected bloggers and engage them in a good, useful discussion online – on their blog, on your blog, wherever it makes sense.
And don’t forget to take advantage of social media tools – not just Twitter and Facebook, but YouTube and others that might be specific to your field. Make it easy for your readers to share your content, too, with RSS feeds, email subscriptions, and “Tweet this” and other buttons that let them tell their circle of friends that your posts are worth a look.

Lorcs over and out!!