Blog SEO Tips: Are keywords that important?

A few days ago I received a comment on one of Blogsessive’s older posts on SEO & keywords. That comment got me a little worried about the fact that due to people spreading incomplete information, or just putting out statements like “Google doesn’t care about keywords”, some of you might think that having a keyword strategy is pointless. This is what reader David Housman asked:

I thought that search engines had stopped factoring keywords into relevancy?

The source of this belief is probably a post published on the Google Webmaster Central Blog back in September 2009 in which Matt Cutts refers strictly to Google not making use of the keywords META tag in order to calculate a search result’s relevancy to the search query.

In other words, you could type 300 keywords of your liking there. Google will just skip them entirely and rather decide if the result is relevant only based on the content itself. This doesn’t mean that the Google bot will ignore your keywords. It means that it will consider only those keywords present on page, in the content. That’s why it is extremely important to write your blog post from both the perspective of a human reader and a search engine bot.

I’m not going to get any deeper into the topic of writing SEO friendly content. Just remember that it’s a must if you want to rank high for certain keywords and phrases. For more information please read some of the articles I have published here in the past:

• Using Keywords for Blog Optimization
• Advantages of Long Tail Keywords Optimization
• Top SEO Mistakes to Avoid
• SEO-Friendly Content is the Key
• How to check and improve your WordPress SEO

Corporate Blogging Guide (5): Blog Editors & Editorial Policy

Depending on the type of corporate blog you’re targeting, you can then put together an editorial team. To make sure you correctly appoint those in charge of content generation and blog management, you need to consider the following criteria:

1. Criteria to help build the editorial team

The future bloggers needs to be/have:

1. Experts in the filed they are going to cover;
2. A good communicator, able to manage potential communication crises arising from dialogues and feedback generated by the blog;
3. Concise, clear and explicit when they express themselves, as they will not target only those who are in their turn experts and are acquainted to the field’s jargon;
4. Believable and genuine in what the provided information is concerned;
5. A human touch and a pleasant manner of writing;
6. Ready to face a reduced level of privacy in their lives, at least in what the online world is concerned.

2. PR department involvement

Most communications through the corporate blog usually abide by the general public relations policies within the company, thus it is strongly recommended that your blogger(s) work together with your PR department. Their collaboration helps:

1. abide by the general communication tone imposed by company standards;
2. prevent or, if needed, manage possible communication crises;
3. develop the bloggers’ communication skills and ability to generate valuable content.

Click here to read the full blog post!

Corporate Blogging Guide (1): Introduction to Blogging

A few months back I was invited to attend, as a speaker, an event on corporate blogging where the people in the audience were mostly PR Managers for different companies in my country. Along with the PowerPoint presentation, I have decided to also give those who attended the event more information on corporate blogging through an eBook I wrote at that time.

The following post is the first chapter of that eBook, translated into English. The rest of the chapters will be also published, over the next few days, except for the weekend. Now, let’s see what corporate blogging is about and if it is the right tool for you and your business.

1.1 Blog, Blogging, Blogosphere

The term blog, contracted form of weblog, defines a certain type of website where texts, photos, audio or video content are published in chronological order, much like an online diary.

The first blogs date back to 1993 when the term was first introduced, but they only started to be used more frequently in 1998 when the first blog community, Open Diary, appeared.

The true hit of the online mainstream happened around 2002-2003, when the first blog reactions regarding the Iraq war were published and when Google acquired the Blogger.com platform, which allows any person with Internet access to create and maintain their own blog.

The Blogosphere comprises all public blogs and is defined as a community based on the theory that all existing blogs are somehow interconnected, often through blogrolls or links inserted in their content.
Click here to read the full blog post!

3 New 9Rules Member Blogs You Should Read

As some of you might already know, on September 3^rd, 9Rules published a list of the newest network accepted members. Out of over 70 blogs in the list, three of them caught my attention (one I already knew) due to the quality of their posts. These are all blogs on blogging and tangent subjects as SEO, writing, social media and internet marketing. Here they are:

Congratulations to all four (BloggingTips.com included) for all the work they’ve put into creating and maintaining such amazing blogs!

The Educational Value of Blogging

In the early stages, blogs were mostly online diaries sharing girlfriend/boyfriend gossips, personal photos and experiences. As times passed, blogging evolved into a mass phenomenon. The more people getting caught into this blogs galore, the more experiences shared by different personalities. New trends emerged, niche blogs appeared and blogging became what we see today, a hard to perfectly define, segmented concept of online information sharing.

Whether people perceive it as an alternative to classic forms of journalism, tools for self-help, an online job or the simple morning coffee reading, nowadays, blogging has a massive educational value.

Premises of educational blogging

By educational blogging I’m not only talking about edublogs – those blogs maintained by teachers or people involved in the educational system – but also about blogs that provide helpful information on different topics.
Click here to read the full blog post!