Outrank.com

Author: Tara Cuccia

One of the ways in which we engage our team is through our blogs. Blogging is a great way to share industry and company news and updates, recognize achievements and congratulate one another as well as joke around occasionally. Blogs give companies the opportunity to relate to what’s going on in their industry and make comparisons, form opinions and make predictions.

Blogging is a creative way to stay up to date and it is a valuable tool to be able to share knowledge and experiences with those outside of the company as well. Blogging is not only a great way to stay connected and form community networks, but also a great place to garner feedback from consumers and customers. User-generated content is extremely valuable to learn where you have room for improvement, what people need and therefore what you might look at developing down the road.

Not only is blogging an essential aspect of solidifying your company culture and forming a trustworthy online community of users but it is also something that can help with your own corporate online rankings by way of link sharing. A team member shares a blog post they found useful or funny either by emailing it to a friend or posting the link to their Facebook or Twitter page … and other people visit the blog and/or share it as well. The more views and shares you get, the better your ranking on the search engines because they algorithmically assume your sight is important and have received “votes”. The better your ranking, the more consistently search engines return you in results and the easier you are to be found … and hopefully services rendered.

Back to blogging … it’s very useful for various reasons, as I hopefully just made clear. Now, any time we talk about the internet, mobile usage has to be considered in the overall equation because it is so immensely popular and convenient. And we’re all about convenience in America but, more appropriately, in SEO. Search engine optimization. We optimize aything online that is relevant, ethical, and useful to your business. Optimization = convenience because if you’re optimized to be easily found online, you’ve won half the battle already. We’ve cut out the work for you AND your potential customer. We help the search engines find you by speaking their language and, in turn, speaking the same language as consumers. After all, their job is to provide the best solution to whatever consumers are looking for.

Say Jane is out having a coffee and is thinking about all the things she needs to do to get the house ready for her out of town guests coming next week. After she painted the extra bedroom she realized painting is no easy task and she doesn’t want to tackle the rest of the house. So she types “painters in austin” into her browser on her Smartphone. Within seconds, a few options show up on the front page of Google, including your business. After she clicks the link to your website and finds out some information about your services, she dials your number to talk about pricing and scheduling. New customer!

Let’s back up for a minute. We’re talking about blogging as relates to mobile media. The Mobile Mondays Column on Search Engine Land recently asked the question “Do Mobile Blog Templates Have Enough Substance for SEO?” The answer is yes.

As more online activity shifts to mobile devices, bloggers are becoming aware of the benefits of having mobile versions of their websites. As luck would have it, the developers of major blogging platforms recognized this, and stepped-in to provide default solutions for those wanting to serve-up content to a mobile audience without a lot of investment.

The column outlines some specifics as to what developers did to make default settings for mobile blogging solutions on platforms like Blogger, Wordpress and Posterous. Additionally, you’ll find best practices for managing your blog:

Best Practices For Mobile SEO
The good news is that all these platforms are taking a similar route, so best practices are easy to formulate. Here are a few factors to keep in mind as you manage your blog:

•Post titles are more important than ever, because they become a large portion of the visible content on your blog’s home page. Engines and users alike will be very dependent on your post titles to figure out what your content is about.
•Posts themselves are largely untouched, so there’s no technical need to write shorter posts. One might argue that mobile users will have a get-to-the-point attitude when it comes to mobile content. But my opinion is that commercial sites need to be brief (“Where’s that 1-800 number?”) whereas blogs are for readers, and readers, well, want to read. For more on this, check out my previous post on brevity versus mobile SEO.
•A suggestion specific to self-hosted WordPress bloggers (or anyone self-hosting a platform) would be to constantly maintain updates for your mobile plug-ins. Because these plug-ins rely on user agent lists, these lists have to stay updated to keep-up with new phones being released to the market. At minimum, you’ll want to update whenever you see a new wave of TV commercials for a hot new phone.