Writing blog posts with an eye toward search engine optimization, or any other content for SEO, can be challenging, which is why we have prepared the following blog writing tips to guide you through the process.

1. Fresh Content – Do not begin writing for your blog unless you can commit to a schedule of at least one to two posts per week.  Also, do not commit to a blog if you do not have your own unique ideas.  Don’t worry; the next few tips can help you generate ideas if you are fresh out.

2. Blog Purpose – What is the purpose of your blog?  Don’t lose sight of your reason for creating it in the first place.  Brainstorm a number of words related to the topic and see if any of these words spark an idea for a post.

3. New New New! – What is new within your company or industry?  People love hearing about new information and then sharing time-sensitive content they discover with their networks.  Are you introducing a new product or service, revamping an older one, or actively participating in your community?  Let people know with a blog post.  If you have photographs, images, quotes, or videos to include – even better!

4. FAQs – For whatever reason, you find visitors to your website, prospective clients, or current clients, are asking the same questions over and over again.  Besides updating the pertinent parts of your website and your FAQ page, consider writing blog posts that focus on answering each of these questions in depth.  Not only are they likely to come up in searches for those looking for answers (which will then lead them to your website), but they can be used to send so the inquirer can read the answer at their own pace or have a reminder of a conversation they had earlier.

5. Events – Is your company actively participating in conferences, tradeshows, festivals, or webinars?  Whether physically present, marketing at, or digitally sharing, any events with which you are involved are timely content your readers may be interested in hearing about.  Don’t forget that events are good for at minimum two to three posts:

a. Pre-event coverage of where you will be, when, and why!
b. At-event coverage of what is happening.
c. Post-event follow-up, thanking those whom you spoke with, your hope to attend an annual event in the next year or to conduct a helpful webinar again soon, etc.

6. Ask Employees – Those employed at your company have a wealth of knowledge about the work that you do.  Ask for ideas about what to post.  Sometimes it helps if you ask a prompting question such as “What is something our company is doing right now that prospective clients would be interested in hearing about?” or “Do we have any client satisfaction stories we can pair with a quote and information about that product or service and post to our blog?”

7. Optimize! – Make sure that the titles of your blog posts are both interesting and relatively short.  Write a description to be included in the meta-tags of the blog post when it is posted online.  Consider asking your SEO agency to conduct keyword research to help you find niche or longer-tail keyword phrases you could write about.  Consult your analytics data to see which blog posts are driving traffic (and if visitors are converting) and consider writing more on the topics that are delivering good visitors.

The above blog writing tips are a good starting point when you find yourself stuck before writing a blog post.  Good luck with your own writing and if you ever need help conducting keyword research or would like to outsource your writing, we would be happy to help.

The truth is: search engines love PDF files. It may be a different file type than HTML, but crawlers are able to index and understand the information they contain with relative ease. It’s really not uncommon to see PDFs holding a 1 or 2 ranking in SERPs.

Unfortunately, they do not usually work as strong drivers for SEO campaigns. All too often, PDFs are used because they can be more convenient, faster, and easier to build than an HTML page. But in the rush for this convenience, PDFs don’t get optimized the way that they should to boost your main website and brand. 
Follow these basic tips to help maximize the SEO return you get on your PDF files:

Include links: This is a very common mistake – you open a PDF and it contains only information with no links to the original source. This is bad for two reasons. Firstly, you’re not giving the people who find your PDF a way to learn more about you or visit your site. The second is that you are missing out on back links. Remember, crawlers understand the text in a PDF the same way they do for an HTML file. This means they can see and account for the links included in your PDF.

Make the most of your title: PDFs are files, but they do not deserve standard file names like “Report2627FINAL.pdf.” Both crawlers and users will not think highly of such a non-descriptive title. Give your PDF files descriptive, keyword-rich titles to increase their SEO impact.

Don’t go overboard: It can be all too easy to load a PDF with images, styled fonts, and other design elements. However, the more you add, the longer it takes to load – which is not good from a usability standpoint or an SEO standpoint. Try to use a streamlined design for your PDFs and always compress them when saving.

PDFs are convenient web elements with a wide variety of applications for your online presence. It’s worth it to take steps to optimize them, just like you would for the rest of your web pages.

Do you have a blog set up using WordPress? If you don’t and are considering setting up a blog, you might like the features that WordPress provides to manage your blog through your smart phone. The great thing about WordPress is that it is developed by volunteers who keep creating plugins and improvements to the blog software. Below you can find some of its greatest additions yet.

There is an application available for the iPhone and iPad, which provide several functions that, enable creating posts with multiple kinds of information easily. Some of the features provided include location mapping, which allows you to add to your post where you are posting from. There is also the adding Photos feature, which allows you to select as many photos as you would like to add to your blog post from the ones available on your phone, and WordPress will automatically add the images to your blog post. Another feature is how easy it is to add comments to posts, to keep in touch with your readers, through an interface provided that is easy to moderate and use.

A new feature that was introduce early this month, is the post by voice option, which allows you to publish audio on your blog by following simple steps. All you need to do is enable the post by voice option on your blog, which is located under the dashboard section of your blog and select to enable the feature. WordPress will provide you with a phone number you can call and generate a secret code that is unique to your blog, which allows you to call in and follow the instructions to create your voice post.

Due to real time search results provided by search engines, it is good to keep your blog as up to date as possible to allow a better search result for your site and blog. Sometimes it’s hard to keep updating your blog, but thanks to technology, this is becoming easier to accomplish. I hope to see this application will become available soon for other phones.