WSI Buzz – News & Information on Search Engine Optimization, Internet Marketing and More

Over the life-span of your website, there is a very real possibility that you will generate great deals of content, be it through a blog, or through articles and press releases which you’ve had written.

So, what happens to the content after a couple of years, and you are no longer getting any benefit from it, or through a lack of SEO, it never provided any quantifiable benefit for your website and company to begin with? Well, that content hasn’t gone anywhere. It may have even been archived on your website. Why let it sit there doing nothing for you?

Its time to repurpose that content and give it a fresh new look and feel. Go through your blog archives and find posts that have new relevance in the changing online world. Update it and ensure the content is fresh. Remove old chunks of information which are no longer applicable and then add some new flavor. 10 minutes later, you have yourself a repurposed peice of content!

Now then, what do you do with it? Simple.

1. Determine the new title for the post, and create title tag, and meta tags accodinginly.
2. Create good internal links with strong keyword based anchor text within the blog post.
3. Re-post your new, re-purposed content item and be sure to add your title tag and meta tags so the search engines will index it better.
4. Ensure you blog platform allows people the ability to share the post with their social networks.
5. Push it out to the social networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) and let the people know it’s there. Give them some time to digest it, and hopefully, if your content is valuable enough, people will share it with friends on their social networks as well!

The same approach can be taken with articles that have been gathering dust for years. Repurpose them as blog posts or new articles. If the article is long enough, you may even be able to get a few new blog posts out of it.

But wait! Don’t stop there! Remember all of that info marketing material the company has printed over the years? Break ‘em back out again and put them to work for your business in a more productive fashion. It’s time to get them online! Take 20 minutes and type them up so you can turn them into articles or blog posts for your business. Make sure you update them with current information if needed, the get them onto your website.

And I bet you thought all of that old print material was only good for starting fires?

Again, follow the same principles here. Focus on those basic SEO elements like title tags, meta tags, good internal link practices, and you’ll be surprised just what that old content of your can pull off!

The typical blog consists of 6 parts, or elements:

Posts: A blog post in written by the blog author. In some cases, a blog will have multiple authors or contributors. A post will typically consist of text and images, but can also include embedded video and links to other posts or pages. Depending on how the blog is set up, it can show either the full post, or an excerpt of the post which tends to consist of a few sentences designed to capture the reader’s attention and get them to click for the full post.

Comments: A comment is written by the reader is response to your blog post. In many cases, it will be a reader who is thanking you for what should be great information. In other cases, the reader will be asking for additional information. This provides you with an excellent opportunity to open a line of communication with your audience. Take advantage of this opportunity to build a rapport with your readers!

Sidebar: A sidebar on your blog tends to consist of a number of features, normally widgets which increase the functionality of your blog. Widgets can include functions to pull your Twitter timeline or other things directly into your blog, but is not limited to this. There are thousands of widgets available for free online. Find ones which complement your blog!

Categories: A categories list on your blog allows readers quick access to different information on your blog. Categorizing your posts also gives you SEO benefits by allowing you to separate your information into easily spiderable themes/topics. When you create something user-friendly, it is normally search friendly as well.

Archives: An archive section on your blog gives people easy access to your past posts, normally on a month by month basis. Including an Archive section on your blog is always a good idea, simply because your readers will not have to spend a great deal of time searching for your posts. If they recall a particular post you had written in January for example, they can simply click on the January Archive and find it.

Recent Posts: This is made up of a list of recent posts, normally for the month, on your blog. It will allow your readers the quickly choose from a list of your post titles, drawing them in deeper. Due to this element, you will want to make sure your blog posts of attractive titles.

Now, as stated at the beginning, the typical blog is made up of these 6 elements. By no means should you feel obligated too make use of only these 6 elements. You can pick and choose what elements to include. Make sure you explore your blog platform to discover what other elements they might offer which could be leveraged to provide an enhanced user experience on your blog.

Try including multimedia elements, such as video, if you have some. Blogging is all about capturing your audience, so build a captivating blog and give people a reason to keep on coming back for more!

The actual process of blogging is simple, right? Sit down in front of your computer with a cup of coffee and start typing, right? Wrong.

This is actually the very last step in the process of blogging. First, you need to know your audience. What type of people do you want reading your blog? What type of blog is it? Is it a personal blog where you are simply blogging about your day, your thoughts and feelings? Or, is it an industry related blog, where you will be blogging about new developments in your field of expertise?

These are very important things you need to take into account. So, let’s break down what you need to know before you actually start blogging!

1. What type of blog are you creating? (Personal, Industry, News Aggregation, Political, etc.)
2. What is your target demographic? (Teens, adults, industry professionals,  bloggers, etc.)
3. How often are you going to blog? (Daily, Weekly, Bi-weekly, monthly, etc.)
4. What blog platform are you going to use? (WordPress, Blogger.com, TypePad, etc.)
   • It is important to consider a few things here. Are you planning to host the blog on your own server/URL and does it support certain blog software, or are you going to host it for free through blogger.com or wordpress.com, for example.
   • Each option has positives and negatives. Free hosting, you don’t have as much control over your blog. You can’t completely customize your blog. When you pay for hosting, it’s all yours. You can modify your blog to your heart’s content. Custom templates, widgets, plugins… you name it!
   • Do your homework. Always make sure the information you are putting out is accurate. If you are writing a personal blog, you need not worry. However, if you are writing an industry blog, you need to ensure you information is factual and has value for your readers.
   • Do it from the heart. If you don’t enjoy doing it, it’s going to show in what you do. To quote Dale Carnegie, “People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.”

And please keep in mind, if you can’t find the time to write a blog post every few days consisting of about 200-300 words, you are working too hard. Take a breather. In the words of Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

In other words, do what you love, and love what you do. If you don’t like blogging, then don’t torture yourself into creating new posts every day, every week, or even every month! Myself, I enjoy blogging. This post actually has 465 words right now, and I have only been writing for a few minutes. The trick is, don’t stress about what you are writing.

Just let it flow.

In today’s society, it is difficult to imagine a time before the blog. It has even gotten to the point where we are addicted to micro-blogging, which comes to us in the form of the “tweet”, made possible by Twitter. But where did it all start? Well, for that we need to take a trip way back the early 80’s.

The concept of blogging has been around since 1983, but technology didn’t quite catch up until the rise of HTTP in the early 1990’s. Before the modern web, there was Usenet, which was the original internet. Usenet had a number of moderated newsgroups which allowed people the opportunity to share their thoughts with a group of people under the moderation of a certain individual or a small group of people. For the most part, they were simply discussion groups.

Not everyone had access to this medium in order to express themselves, however. We must bear in mind that this was the early days of what would one day become the internet.

In 1983-1984, this began to evolve, thanks to a man by the name of Brian E. Redman and some of his friends. They began to make summary postings on Usenet about other interesting postings being made in different “threads” on other discussion boards. The original news aggregators.

Let’s take a step forward into the 1990’s and what was then the “modern” blog.

In the early 90’s blogging, or “weblogs” as it is actually known, began to evolve into an online diary format. These early blogs were basically difficult to update web pages where people would write about their day, their thoughts or their feelings. These writings were thrust out onto the web, often with very few people ever even seeing them. At this time, due to the limitations of design and connection speed, these blogs were often bare-bones in styling.

Jump forward again to the late 90’s.

Now, we are beginning to see blog platforms being introduced to the online-world. In 1998, Open Diary launched. This was the innovator of the “reader comment”, giving your follower the chance to comment on posts and actually open a line of communication with a web author, or “blogger”.

One year later, in March of 1999, Brad Fitzpatrick, who is also a well-known blogger, created LiveJournal, an online journal which is open to the public, and still around to this day.

In this same year, Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan of Pyra Labs launched Blogger.Com, which was purchased by Google in 2003. Blogger.com enjoyed massive success as one of the most advanced blog platforms the world had ever seen. This platform started a new revolution in blogging, making it easier to combine personal pages with valuable tools such as permalinks, blogrolls and trackbacks.

When this was combined with weblog search engines, it opened a whole new door for blog enthusiasts to find new blog authors and connect with bloggers who shared similar interests.

In May of 2003, the blog game changed once again with the launch of WordPress. Sources say that WordPress blogs comprise 2% of the 10,000 biggest websites online today. Created by Matt Mullenwag, as of September 2009 WordPress was being used by more than 202 million websites globally.

This open source blog publishing application revolutionized blogging, allowing for a simple, yet sophisticated templating system that made for seamless integration into a websites which supported PHP and MySQL. The user-friendly workflow and stunning plugin architecture employed by WordPress attracted many new users and, as far as this author is concerned, started the era of the modern blogger.

So, into the blogosphere, you ask? What is the blogosphere, exactly?

The term “blogosphere” was originally coined back in 1999 by Brad L. Graham as a joke. In 2002, it was re-coined by William Quick and quickly propagated across the internet. This term originally stemmed from the term “logosphere”, from the Greek “logos”, meaning “word”, and “sphere”, meaning “world”. So, in other words, the world of words.

Welcome to the Blogoshpere