Blog To Great

Total SEO Efforts Matter

BLOG TIPS - Too often webmasters and bloggers depend too heavily on their content and neglect the importance of promoting it, believing that "Content is King".  Well, we do believe that, but know that all Kings have workers to help run the kingdom.  By now you likely realize that even with a wonderfully written and regularly updated blog, you won't gather many links to your posts if websurfers don't know your blog exists.  Competition is fierce and good blog content is plentiful.

One of the keys to getting good page ranks on search engine listings is with correct BALANCE. Good blogs need to strike a balance between links and keyword optimization to gain a better likelihood at improving your blog’s search engine rankings. Why?  Well, an appropriate balance is effective as it makes it easier for search engines to track, index and classify your content in search results.

Since you're likely looking for more readers and want your blog at the top of search engine results, it will be worth the effort to follow these tips to build good links more effectively:

Google Analytics Explained, and Some Great Tips

      BLOG TIPS - As you likely know, GOOGLE ANALYTICS is a free service from Google that gives bloggers / website operators helpful, detailed stats about the visitors to your blog.  But do you use it to it's fullest and often enough.  It's the most widely used web analytics application and most respected.  It came out of the analytics-package developed by Urchin Software Corporation (which was purchased by Google in April 2005).  And, the best feature is that it's geared to marketers and great for bloggers looking to monetize a blog / move up in search engine rankings and not to techy webmasters.  Google Analytics tracks visitors from all of the referrers to your blog; that includes search engines,  display ads and PPC (pay per click) networks.

It's linked to their Adwords, so you can review your online campaigns by tracking the landing page quality and conversions.   This way, you can look at sales, lead generations, views to a specific page, or downloads of a particular file.  With GA, your able to figure out which of your ads are performing the best, and which aren't, to give you the needed tools to revise, end and update campaigns.

Read the Smash Magazine post for more info and some great Google Analytics tips !

Reader and Subscriber Development for a Better Blog

     BLOG TIPS - When you want to grow your blog, no matter if it's is a personal, professional or company blog that you manage, and no matter what your blog's niche, the first thing that comes to your mind is likely to be about increasing traffic or adding subscribers.  As we know, getting more traffic or subscribers is always a good thing, such a blog can never have too many readers.  The more readers, the more possible revenue.  But, to  sustain your traffic you need to understand who the people are that come to your blog.

Time to consolidate your blog efforts into the key tasks that will bring returns.  Some key areas that bloggers need to fully understand involve knowledge of who readers are, how they've found your blog with the cool domain name and how often they're visiting & staying at your blog (how sticky is your blog?). These Metrics,such as time on site, bounce rate, and percentage of return visitors will help you tremendously.  To do all this, you'll need a good system of analytics and your own plan of engagement to maximize your blog's full potential. Lijit and Google Analytics SITE SEARCH are both good tools for internal search data analysis.  And to continue to engage your readers, make your posts interesting, ask questions, solicit commenting and use Twitter .  Make sure you respond to all comments and reply to each e-mail received. 

Thanks to Neil Patel (of QuickSprout.com), see his guest post at WashingtonPost.com.  Questions / comments, your advice?  Feel free to add below, and Blog to Great !

YAHOO ANALYTICS Scores Higher Than GOOGLE's in New Study

     Blog Tips -  A new study out this week from CMS Watch says that Yahoo may win the free web analytics battle against Google.  This despite Google's success in the small and medium sized business market, Yahoo Web Analytics surpasseed Google in several areas, and is said to be a better fit for enterprises than Google Analytics.  Quite a surprise, considering Yahoo! has been at analytics only since early 2008 when it acquired IndexTools.  The new report measured twenty web analytics platforms against twelve potential use-cases. Out of the web analytics platform, seven are Saas only: Coremetrics, Digital River’s Fireclick, Google Analytics, Intellitracker Enterprise R6, Nedstat's Sitestat, Omniture SiteCatalyst and Yahoo! Web Analytics.