Attention Conservation Notice: The following post provides an eight-point litmus test that B2B marketers and bloggers can use to evaluate their blog posts for Search Engine Optimization and relevance to business objectives.

I’ve stepped in to blog for Network Performance Daily recently since our full-time blogger was vacationing in New Zealand. For the 99.8% of The B2B Lead readers who live outside the network engineering universe, Network Performance Daily is the NetQoS corporate blog. It’s rated in the top .99% of all blogs and received great coverage including this piece in Computerworld. And, it’s also driven a great deal of interest in and revenue for our company. So, we must be doing something right.

One thing we haven’t done right (until recently) however, is to stay on track with our core audience and our company interests. Blogging is, after all, a conversation and conversations often stray off track. The allure of technological innovation was just too great at times and we were sucked into the dazzling world of iPhones and flying cars.

Clearly, it was time to get the blog content back on track to share network engineering tips, news and analysis with our core readers so that we could improve our sagging reader loyalty numbers. This was my goal when I stepped back in to blog for NetQoS, but what I discovered was there were far more benefits to staying on track with the content than just improving readership.

Of course, I knew there was a strong connection between the blog and SEO ranking. I also knew the blog was a great tool to attract readers and prospects to download content from our web site. But, until I actually dug in and crafted my own posts, I didn’t really understand the “magic” and how to create a repeatable process to boost SEO rankings which inevitably drive demand and brand awareness. So, with a few posts under my belt and a dramatic boost in SEO rankings for a couple of valuable keywords, I put together this quick litmus test for ALL future NPD posts.

I know that most blog and social media purists will violently disagree with these tips. They will argue that one should not be blogging with marketing and sales interests in mind. Last time I checked, however, I didn’t live in a Socialist country. And, my ego isn’t important enough to spend hours pontificating about topics without at least something to gain. We are all blogging with an objective in mind. I believe they key is in the “intent” of the post. If your goal is to be found, to educate and to attract a following of potential new customers without making false promises, then the following litmus test should help you to keep your posts on track with objectives:

1. Topic must be relevant to your target audience and—even better— to our company and product or service offerings.
2. Topic should be educational, controversial, timely or related to a news event. Bonus points for link-bait articles like posting a list of valuable resources, expert interviews, how-to’s, special reports, etc.
3. Post must begin with easy-to-understand and keyword-rich title (not just a cleverly worded headline). The goal is to communicate what the story and takeaways are about before the reader has to read the story.
4. Must contain links back to prior blog stories, an important corporate web page, press release or a white paper with more information. The exact keywords that are linked to those pages should correspond with the SEO terms for which those pages are optimized.
5. Post must be tagged with right keywords for SEO and content so that it can be categorized and found.
6. Posts should include our thought leadership messages where appropriate.
7. Post should include a list of tips that can be linked to from within the blog.
8. Post must challenge readers to take action in the last sentence—ie. continue the conversation, seek more information or spread the word.

So, that’s my quick list. I’m sure there are more. I’m sure some of these may become too cumbersome to apply. But it’s worth a shot. I mean, what is the value of a Google Page 1 listing to your company? With 80 to 90% of buyers starting their search on Google, I’d recommend giving it a shot.

I’d like to hear about your experiences with blogging and SEO. Importantly, what has been your success in achieving the coveted Google double listing?

Contributed by Scott Daughtry, SEO Specialist, NetQoS

The B2B Lead features a number of helpful articles on copywriting, so I thought I’d share one of my favorite tips for ensuring B2B marketing copy is relevant. As marketers we constantly try to write compelling copy that motivates people to take some sort of action. The trick is to write in the voice of our target audience; speaking to them using language they respond to. Sometimes we use focus groups or A/B testing to help with this; getting out in the field and talking to prospects/customers also helps. In the end though, the words we choose often amount to best guesses.

Keyword research tools like Wordtracker, Google Trends, and the Google Keyword Tool provide a wealth of insight into the voice of our audience. Using search data and trends can give excellent clues to the words people use to describe things. Talking to your audience, using the same words they search for themselves, puts you at a major advantage. For example, the other day I was crafting an email to promote a new webcast. Problem was, some people were calling it a webcast and others were calling it a webinar – which was it? What would more people respond to; a webcast offer or a webinar offer? I decided to use Google Trends to compare the search volume of both words. I figured the term that is searched more often will also be the term used more commonly in conversation. This term should also spark a higher interest if used in my email. So I quickly pulled up Google Trends and here is what I found.

This obviously made my decision easy. Split testing my email offers confirmed that using “webcast” got the better response.

Now, this is just search-driven copywriting in its simplest form. If you want to take this further, you can use the Google Keyword Tool or Wordtracker almost like you would a Thesaurus. For example, maybe you are promoting a “golf strategies” guide. If you plopped this keyword into the Google Keyword Tool, it would offer you numerous suggestions for related terms people are searching for. In this example (shown below) maybe you would be better off promoting it as a “golf tips” guide since that term is searched more frequently.

Hopefully by now, you are starting to get the idea. This stuff really works – I have personally seen higher conversion rates on landing pages and emails by using this strategy. If you are interested in reading more about similar ideas, Aaron Wall has a very interesting article on keyword research that is definitely worth a read.

http://learn.wordtracker.com/articles/keyword-inspiration-aaron-wall-of-seobookcom-shares-his-secrets/

http://www.wordtracker.com
http://www.google.com/trends
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

This week, Google alerted Business Wire that press release headlines should not exceed 22 words. That’s eight words shorter than what we were told months ago. “An ideal headline should be between two and 22 words,” advises the search engine giant. Read more at BusinessWired.

Back to our favorite topic – writing—or, in this instance, writing for the Web. Ragan Communications recently posted 25 tips for busy Web site managers . In it they provided this very intriguing benchmark:

If you expect to get your content read today, you need to keep it very short. Memorize this table:
If you write. . . You’ve lost. . .

100 words 25% of your readers
300 words 40% of your readers
500 words 60% of your readers
1,000 words 80% of your readers

There are, of course, the other writing advisors who counsel that you need to provide all of the information a buyer needs to make a purchase right there on the page? Isn’t there a happy medium? This is the Web, after all. What do you think? How long should web copy be?

Our beloved advisor, Marketing Sherpa, has released a lengthy study on B2B Web Site Home Page design. The researchers used eye-tracking and multi-site testing techniques to provide numerous lessons that most of us don’t have the budget to discover on our own. I highly recommend purchasing it and putting the lessons into action. Not convinced? Here are a few highlights from the study and some surprises:

• Don’t copy the big guys or your competitors when it comes to Web site layout. Always design with your user in mind.
• Here’s a big surprise (but it makes total sense when you think about it) – Having a sticky homepage is no longer the right goal. In the Sherpa tests, homepages with shorter average visit times generated more sales. Think of it as a table of contents – show people how to get to the information they need quickly. 
• Fewer columns are better as people prefer to read down a list, similar to search engine results. However, you must beware of overly wide columns—do not use more than 65 characters of type across a line).
• Always use bullets, they receive much of the eye’s attention.