Thanks to everyone that attended the Social Media Breakfast Maine: Speed Dating Style on 8/25/2011. We were delighted to be the SEO Expert on-hand to help answer everyone’s questions. Below is my SEO cheat sheet on link building which was one of the most popular questions.
SMBME: Speed Dating Style – SEO Expert
View more documents from Mainely SEO
If you are a blogger you may have heard of the Zemanta plugin available for various blogging platforms such as WordPress, MoveableType, Drupal and Joomla. The plugin can also be installed on your Firefox, Chrome or IE web browser. If you haven’t used The Zemanta plugin I would highly recommend it for many different reasons, one of which is to help you build links. Zemanta is essentially a blogging coach, helping improve your writing in many different ways. As you start to write a new post, it suggests related content already on the web similar to yours to link to. It will also show you complementary pictures to embed in to your posts and will recommend popular keywords to include in your copy. By implementing these suggestions, you should receive more traffic because you’re using popular keywords and your posts will be more engaging with good pictures so your visitors will stay on your site longer.
Zemanta as a Link Building Tool
Most SEO professionals perform their own keyword research before starting to write a new post and probably already have an idea for images, but if you don’t this is a great tool. My favorite use for the Zemanta plugin is to help me find related sites to acquire links from. I start out by creating a new blog post and pasting a list of keywords I am trying to target. Zemanta scans over the keywords and makes recommendations for similar articles from their network of sites. The articles listed in Zemanta tend to have more traffic and authority, so they make great link targets.
Why You Should Comment On Blogs To Build Your Brand
If you have your own business then you know how important it is to get your brand “out there.” By now you also know how important it is to have a strong web/social media presence if you expect your company to survive and thrive amongst your competition. Part of the strategy to meet your goals and build your brand should be to actively blog comment.You should also be participating in the conversations in and around your brand’s niche. There’s a whole lot going on in cyberspace regarding you company’s specialty, I guarantee it! And why wouldn’t you want to be an active participant? If you aren’t, you are probably missing out on precious dollars that I know you would love to have.
I read a lot of blogs each and every day and I am very thankful to Google Reader for keeping it all organized for me, but I am even more thankful to all of the bloggers out there that keep the original, awesome content coming! If you read other blogs, I guarantee that you will come up with some ideas that could help your future blogging efforts or that may help you to market your brand more effectively. Either way it’s all good stuff.