Related posts:

1. Dear Twitter . . . What I like about you.

1. Have “Bruce” read to you – slowly

Proofreading is great – and absolutely necessary. But you know how it is. When you write something, you get very close to it. Sometimes, even the most eagle-eyed of us will overlook an obvious spelling or grammar mistake. However, if you have your computer read your post back to you, your keen ears might pick up things your eagle eyes have missed!

This is easy to set up on a MAC. Go to Apple > System Preferences > Speech and choose your preferred voice (such as Bruce or Viki) and the speed at which you want it read. Then set your key command (I use “command shift s”).

When you want to hear your text, highlight it in your document and press your command.

2. Catch the eye of search engines

It’s no secret that the right keywords can help your blog get noticed by the search engines, hence sending more traffic your way. However, when writing a blog post, working in popular keywords related to your topic isn’t always in the forefront of your mind. If you’re on a roll, you just want to write and publish, right?

SEO Blogger is a Firefox add-on created by Wordtracker that actually suggests the right keywords to use while you’re writing your blog.

This free tool provides real-world search data. It opens in a sidebar panel where you enter a keyword or keyphrase and SEO Blogger gives you keyword suggestions ranked by popularity. You decide which to use in your post.

I have a Wordpress blog, but according to Wordtracker, SEO Blogger works with whatever blog publishing software you’re using.

3. Get personal with a Gravatar

Your Gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatar) is an image that follows you from site to site, appearing beside your name when you comment or post on a blog other than your own. It could be your photo or an image that represents your business. I use my pink rubber boots for mine.

Mud Creative gravatar

The nice thing about the Gravatar is that it gives you control over the image that is used. Otherwise, your comment will be accompanied by a generic symbol or gray silhouette. Your Gravatar shows a little bit more of who you are, and can even encourage people to click through to your site. Readers are more apt to connect to a face rather than a name.

Go to www.gravatar.com to add some personality to the comments you leave on other blogs.

Note, though, that if you’re leaving a comment on a blog that does not have the “Show Avatar” setting selected, your Gravatar won’t show up. But the use of Gravatars is catching on across the blogging community, so it’s only a matter of time!

4. Share the luv

One day I was leaving a comment on another blog, and when I hit “submit,” a link to the last post I’d written on my own blog at Mud Creative was added to the bottom of my comment. That means that anyone who reads my comment can click on the link and visit my blog!

Always a wealth of information, Tzaddi over at Thrivewire informed me that it was a WordPress Plugin called Comment Luv.

Comment Luv is a great way to “share the luv” by promoting other people’s blogs. Plus, it encourages them to visit the Mud Creative blog and leave me a comment when they want to contribute to the conversation.
Luv luv luv it!

5. Be Social-able

OK, this may a no-brainer for many bloggers, but it is worthy of repeating.

Add a social bookmarking widget plugin to make it easy for readers to bookmark and share your posts on their favorite social media channel like LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. The more people you have sharing the news about your posts, the more your audience will grow.

My blog uses the AddThis plugin, (One of the many helpful nuggets from Glenn Murray of Divine Write in his terrific book, SEO Secrets) which adds a globally recognized button at the bottom of each post. Readers simply click on it and a box of social media choices comes up, enabling them to spread the word.

It’s always nice to share, and even better when you make it so easy to do.

What toys have you discovered to make your blog more sexy and attractive to others?

Related posts:

1. Blogging. If it’s not part of your “here I am!” strategy – it should be.
2. Free Social Media Listening Tools
3. Blogging. An excuse for poor communication?

Related posts:

1. Free Social Media Listening Tools
2. How To Gain Followers and Influence Tweeple – by Glenn Hilton
3. Tips to optimize your website easily

Wrong.

As I tell all of my clients, SEO is not a quick fix, but an ongoing effort. While it may appear to work initially, this could be but a blip in the radar. If you look away, your SEO efforts fizzle. And then you’re back at square one. Here’s why:

If your site wasn’t designed with SEO in mind in the first place, your SEO efforts are more of a band-aid. Perhaps you’ve had some new title and meta tags created and added some keyphrases in strategic places. But this will only take you so far.

A solid SEO strategy goes deeper into restructuring the architecture of the site, coding it in such a way that it is easy for the engines to read and follow, writing pages that specifically target highly researched keyphrases, using keyword-rich hyperlinks that lay down a scent and lead visitors logically from page to page, and much more.

If your site doesn’t have fresh, changing content, both the engines and your visitors eventually lose interest. Your site needs to be dynamic, with lots of juicy stuff for visitors to consume. As the engines see it, if your site is static, then it won’t be valuable for searchers. That means it eventually drops down on the results pages.

If your site isn’t popular with other sites, it won’t be popular with the engines. An oft-ignored SEO tactic is link building. The more links you have coming into your site, the more popular it is perceived to be to the engines. To get links, you need to engage in tactics such as online press releases and articles, plus social media channels like blogging and Twitter.

If your site isn’t engaging your visitors, they won’t stick around. The real reason you want to optimize your site is not to get better rankings and more traffic, but to get more qualified traffic coming to your site to buy your product or service.

A well-optimized, well-written and well-planned site will be a rich bed of content for your visitors. Your dynamic site will give your visitors what they want in the form of copy that engages them and offers a solution to their problems, and an active blog and/or articles that keep them informed. Other ideas include a free newsletter, ebook, white paper or report that they can download and refer to, a contest, a coupon or a free product sample.

If your website is offering what visitors are looking for, they stay awhile. Your bounce rate (the rate at which visitors leave your site) decreases. Your conversion rate increases.

If you’re serious about optimizing your site, don’t apply a band-aid. Your site wasn’t created overnight (I hope not anyway), and your SEO shouldn’t be either.

Related posts:

1. A neophyte guide to using keywords – Part 2
2. A neophyte guide to keyword research – Part 1
3. Why free press release sites may be all you need