To some smaller organizations, the decision to add a blog to their website isn’t a hard one. What about those larger, more conservative companies? They stand to lose a lot more and aren’t generally a fan of the risk factor. Their fear is well justified though – employees have been dooced for posting confidential information or information that would be embarrassing to the organizations they worked for. Many companies are mainly worried about losing control of their company message and reputation.

However, there are many advantages to blogging for your business. They’re great for bringing traffic and links to the company website as well as promoting new products or services. Search engines love web pages that are constantly updated and include a lot of content - a blog caters to these search engine obsessions. A blog is also an easy way to measure success and receive feedback on a business’ products and services as visitors can easily comment (unless this is opted out of) on posts and link back to information they find valuable or interesting.

Before starting a company blog there are several things to consider. For example who will write for the blog? Should there be rules for writers? Which blog software should be used? A full-time blog takes a lot of work to maintain and writing interesting or valuable posts at a consistent rate can be difficult for any one regular employee to maintain. However if several employees are to contribute to the blog then it would be wise to establish some guidelines and policies for them to follow while writing. Staff availability and dedication is something that is essential to a successful corporate blog. Depending on the size of the company and how active the blog will be there are several different choices for blog software platforms. Some popular choices tend to be Wordpress, Blogger, and Typepad.

Even though there are several risks to starting a blog for large companies there are also a few ways to mitigate that risk by adding things such as comment and post moderation – so that nothing goes live until it has been approved. Another way is to determine a low-risk focus to the blog while keeping it interesting and valuable to the readers. This keeps employee bloggers focused on safe topics that are unlikely to cause any large ruckus in the blogosphere.

Blogging for a business tends be very beneficial to companies if it’s done properly and with care - rushing into a decision such as this is likely not a good idea. If you plan on starting a blog for your business I highly recommend reading Publish and Prosper: Blogging for Your Business by DL Byron and Steve Broback, as it will give you a great base for business blogging the smart way.

The internet is crowded. Your website does not exist in a space on its own, waiting to be found by your perfect customer. It exists in a crowded space, with many other websites that are competing for exactly those same customers.

How can you set your website apart and be found?

The answer is not just SEO techniques, but SEO strategy. This strategy is the important planning and analysis that should preceed any implementation of any changes to your site. This strategy will focus on your goals for your website and how these goals translate to SEO.

There is an important step in this strategy that should never be overlooked when planning your SEO changes - competitor analysis. It is my belief that any SEO strategy needs to have a considerable focus on the competitive landscape - the results for your business will speak for themselves.

How do you evaluate your competitive landscape for SEO?

1. See how your competitors place

Simply perform searches as a user on search terms that you have identified as important to your business. You will easily find the most prominent online competitors - and may even be surprised to discover a few new ones. Better to know who you are up against in order to better understand how to set yourself apart.

2. See what your competitors are doing well

The search results page itself will  shows trends itself. For example, the top ranked sites will likely have the keyword in their page title. If you look at the first page of search results, and click off to each site, you can get a glimpse of the true competitive landscape. Learn from your competitors and you can level the playing field.

3. See what your competitors are doing poorly

Each competitor site can offer a good list of 'don'ts'. Perhaps a competitor has focused too much on SEO techniques, rather than SEO strategy, and the professionalism of the site has eroded. Always remember that SEO is the first step to get visitors to your site, but once there, they need a reason to stay.

4. Identify the opportunities for your site

Perhaps a known competitor does not appear in the first few pages of results. Perhaps you notice a trend in the SEO techniques of successfully ranked companies.  These scenarios are opportunities for your business.

As in all other areas of business, competitor analysis is exceptionally powerful. Learn from your competitors, and continue to learn about SEO, and you are already on your way.

Effective search engine optimization is based on understanding your target audience - not the target audience you have, but the target audience you want.

For example, I may have a website that gets reasonable traffic, but doesn't seem to be driving my business. I try SEO to improve website traffic, but still do not get the benefit that I seek for my business. What's wrong with this picture? I am not accurately targeting the website visitors that I want with my SEO efforts.

So today, I have two simple questions for you about SEO for your business:

1. "What keywords do your current visitors search on to find your website?"
2. "What keywords do the visitors that you want search on to find the website they want?"

The contrast in these two questions will make all the difference in your SEO strategy.

Step 1 - Find out what keywords visitors use to find your website

The easiest way to do this is to add Google Analytics code to your website. Once this simple code is added, you can monitor your website traffic patterns - and learn from your visitors. You can see what search engines they are using, what keywords they searched on to find your site, how long they stayed once they arrived at your site, and even the path that they took through the content on your site. 

Critical information can be gleaned from this very simple step. For example a peripheral keyword may be driving most of your traffic, but the keyword is not central to your business goals. Thus website visitors arrive at your website, then realize they are at the wrong site, 'bounce' off to the next one.  You can view this scenario as an opportunity to refocus - either capitalize on the current patterns by shifting your business offerings, or replace your SEO efforts with keywords that your desired website visitors actually use to find websites like yours.

Step 2 - Identify the visitors that you want, figure out their goals, and most importantly, speak their language.

Essential to this exercise is that you know which website visitors you want. Once you know this, you need to figure out what goal they seek to achieve. By understanding their goals, you can view the search from their perspective, and then you are that much closer to understanding their language.

How do you learn to speak their language? Try to use words that your customers would use to describe your business. Would they call describe it by its official term, or would they use more informal casual language? Ask your current customers how they would describe your business  - you may be surprised by the answer. Also try variations on the theme to see where the competitors are grouping, and where they may be gaps and opportunities for your business.

In summary - Build the right audience

SEO is not about simply increasing rank and building website traffic, it is about increasing rank for the right keywords that will build the right kind of website traffic that will help your business.

Copywriting for the web is an exercise in balance. Too wordy, and you’ll lose the attention of your audience. Too short, and you aren’t providing enough substance to sustain repeat visits.

The conundrum gets more complex when SEO is also a goal for your website. The reason is that text-based content is the food of search engines. As a result, content that is keyword rich is sure to get you some headway when it comes to search engine optimization. However, it isn’t as simple as loading a page with keywords.

The key to copywriting for SEO is balance. There are 4 factors to consider:

Keyword Density
Keyword density refers to the quantity of keywords seeded in your content, compared to non keyword phrases. Too many keywords in your content and you will do more harm than good. We recommend no more that 5% keywords.

Readibility
SEO will only get visitors to your website, it won’t make them stay. Misplaced keywords and unnecessary content will only frustrate your readers once they get there. Good well-written content will help encourage your website visitors to stay, explore, and even return again later, rather than bounce right off to the next site.

Value
Google values content, but it also highly values in bound links to your site. Link-based popularity means that other people like your site enough to link from their site to yours. To gain this popularity, you need to create value for your website visitors, not just for search engines.

Popularity
In-bound links not only help SEO, they also help drive website visitors to your site from referring websites. This is a great endorsement, and one that harnesses the true power of the web – your website visitors spreading the message about your website simply because they like it.

In order to fully optimize a website for search engines, it is necessary to do a full and thorough evaluation of relevant information about the website. This can often be a long and tiring task but several tools and resources can help make your job a lot easier. I’ve put together a list of the top 3 tools that help you gather information easier and faster than on your own.

Google Analytics
Google Analytics gets top marks in my books because it is not only a helpful tool for search engine optimization, but for user experience and information architecture. By adding the Google Analytics code to your website, you can track not only your page views, but also what your users are searching for, how they’re finding your website, how long they’re staying, and even the path they take as they navigate your website content. Other useful information includes a dynamic map that displays the geographic location of your website visitors, globally as well as locally. Another useful (and fun) feature is a site overlay that shows you exactly where people click when they visit your website. Yes, I love this tool.

Search Engine Simulator
How does a search engine view your website? Now you can find out. With this Search Engine Simulator tool, you can see your website the way that a search engine robot does: no images, no flash; only text. It is an enlightening experience! This is a good way to evaluate simple changes to improve your site, such as rewriting content to add meaning to often over-looked text, such as footer navigation and copyright statements. There is no sign up, simply submit your website address to the simulator, and immediately see the results – and learn from them. Now you can see like a search engine robot, and your website will love you for it.

SEO website grader
Are you curious how your website compares to your competitors? SEO website grader evaluates not only your website, but also those of your competitors. You can see how each site is valued by search engines for content, keywords, site structure, … It can be a humbling experience, but also exceptionally useful – it takes the guess work out of understanding your website, and how it matches up to the competition. You can learn from this tool, and from your competitors – and you can improve your SEO.

When I write a blog I like to attempt to add some fun activities or tidbits of information here and there – it makes things interesting. What is today’s activity you ask?

Go to Google and type in “Untitled Document”. How many results do you get? I got 44,500,000 search results and I have no doubts that you got more.

As Leigh mentioned in his 'SEO for small business' post, title tags are very important for the search engine optimization of a website. Websites get launched daily without title tags. This is often due to forgetfulness or bad habits on the web developer’s part. Could be a result of being rushed too. When a new HTML document is created, most of the time using templates, it includes a title tag of “Untitled Document”.

No matter what you’re selling, advertising, or wanting users to see, getting anywhere near to #1 under any keywords with an untitled document is not likely to happen and your target users are not going to find you.

Title tags aren't just for search engines either. They are viewed by your website visitor in a few prominent places:

• text that appears within the blue bar at the top of a browser window.
• On browser tabs, the title is also what appears in the tab.
• When a website visitor minimizes the browser window, the title tag is what is appears.
• The title is also what appears on the first line of search results in the major search engines.

The best SEO practices also keep in mind the benefit for your website visitors. Provided good meaningful title tags will help your visitors, as well as your search engine rankings.

So be free my friends – go and give the gift to yourself of properly named title tags and watch your website climb the rankings in the search engines.

“Help! I don't have much time to optimize! What can I do?”

If you’re a small business owner who also has the lovely task of managing your own website, then you may have found yourself in this situation….you know you need to do some search engine optimization but you just don’t have the time to do it all. Of course the first thing I’m going to tell you is to give us a call and we’ll handle it for you, but let’s say that’s not yet an option.

What I would tell you to do is to take a good hard look at your web page title tags!

What are title tags you ask? In laymen’s terms, title tags are the HTML tags at the top of a web page that tell the browser what the page is about. You know, look up at the very top of the browser window and at the left you’ll see some text about that page; well, that’s the title tag. It serves two main purposes 1) when displayed in the browser it helps human users identify what the page is about, and 2) it gives search engines an indication of what they can expect to find on that page as well.

Good title tags are arguably one of the most important aspects of SEO. Search Engines such as Google place a fair amount of value in these little guys! They are also one of the easiest tactics for people to both comprehend and employ. What is important is that you know which key words are important to your business, as well as which ones are relevant to that particular page. You’ll definitely want to create UNIQUE title tags for EACH page on your web site. Be sure to examine each page’s content carefully so that the title tags are reflective of the content message on the page. Whatever you do don’t put in keywords that are not relevant to the page content. This will not help you, your visitors, or the search engines! Try to include one or two keywords/phrases in each title tag. Remember to keep them fairly short as most search engines only support 50 to 70 characters.

Finally, have a good look at the content on the page and try logically insert these same keywords in to the content. You’ll want to have a nice keyword density on the page. I say 'logically' and 'nice', because you don’t want to overdo it and end up spamming your own web site with keywords. Just let it come naturally.

Of course there are dozens of more incredible things that you can do to improve your search engine optimization, such as inbound linking, page renaming and alt tags to name a few, but if you’re strapped for time and budget, you can’t go wrong with this approach! Good luck!

Although Flash is a highly sought after medium for websites these days, it may not be the best for search engine optimization. Think of website text as food for a search engine. Search engines 'feed' on many different things, but the most important thing is the keyword rich content. Flash does not provide text-based content for search engines to spider, thus it needs to be used in moderation and in places which still allow good amounts of content to be seen by the search engine spiders.

However, on July 1st 2008, Adobe announced it is teaming up with search industry leaders (like Google and Yahoo!) to improve the search results of dynamic web content (like Flash) and rich internet applications. This means better indexing by search engines and a higher ranking (hopefully) for most flash websites.

This does not mean, however, that you should go nuts with Flash. From a design perspective, although Flash can give that “wow” factor people want, it still needs to be evaluated for effective website usability. Flash should provide "wow" within the context of the user goals for the website content. For example, our Citrus SEO homepage features a prominent banner for Flash case studies, to drive website visitors deeper into the website content.

My recommendation? Evaluate the use of Flash on a case by case basis to balance your SEO goals, business goals, and user goals for your website.