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Can a small business really benefit from a blog? You bet your sweet can-can it can.

OK, so that’s too many cans for one article. Bottom line. You CAN run a small business blog and make it profitable. Here are a few tips on how:

• First, don’t try to swallow the whole apple in one bite. Take it slow. You may not need a daily blog. Start with a weekly blog and move up from there as you need to.
• Secondly, make a list of keywords before you do anything. Then, focus each blog entry on a single keyword. Write 150-200 words on that keyword and link back to your main web site.
• Thirdly, don’t promote your competitors. Promote yourself. No-brainer? You would think, but I see small businesses promoting their competition all the time.
• Fourthly, speak to your audience, not at them. Invite them to participate. Sponsor contests or encourage comments and interaction. That’s really what blogs are for.

Blogging is nothing new. It’s been around awhile. But it is relatively new for business. Some corporate blogs have been quite successful, but not too many small businesses are taking advantage of this free promotional tool. They should.

A blog on your small business web site gives you fresh new content every time you post a blog. That’s very important for search engine saturation. Also, every link from your blog to your web site is counted as a link by Yahoo! and MSN. Google is a little more strict, but that may not be important.

For one thing, Google is largely the search engine for corporate players and techies. The statistics that show Google’s market share are a bit skewed; that’s the big secret.

People who live on the web use Google. They make dozens of searches every day. Most people only make one or two searches a day. AOL users use AOL. Most new users of the Internet are using Yahoo, MSN or AOL. If you run a retail business, those search engines are more important to you than Google, so it’s important that you understand how your blog is being read by them.

Your local business can benefit from a company blog if you understand your customer and address each blog to meet their needs. Key things to remember:

• Blogging takes time. If you don’t have it, don’t start one. At least, don’t do it every day. Once a week or twice a week is OK. But keep a consistent schedule.
• Use a software that allows you to timestamp entries. You can write several at one time and set them to post at an appointed time.
• If you can’t do it yourself, hire someone to do it. You can get a blog ghostwriter for as little as $5 per post.
• Make it keyword focused, for the search engines.

Above all, have fun.

If you’ve started your SEO education, then you already know there are two major factors that comprise search engine optimization…onpage factors and offpage factors. Today, I’d like to share the 8 things your normal blogging habits should include to make sure you master the Onpage Factors

Title Tag

The number one onpage SEO tactic to have is meaningful, keyword rich, descriptive titles for each blog post, blog page and search/archive page in your blog.

Be advised though, Google is onto those *black-hat* tactics like keyword stuffing, so the title should read naturally. Using the same word over and over in your title will get your site banned. Period.

Words closer to the beginning of the title, are given more *weight* than those that are at the end. So, make sure your title gets to the point, quickly.

“I’m blogging, I can’t control the title that appears at the top of the blog window, can I?”

Well, actually, if you are using WordPress right out of the box, probably not. However, there are a number of ways to enhance the title tag, or browser window title with plugins. A couple that come immediately to mind are All In One SEO Pack and HeadSpace2. Both offer customizations that will ensure your title tags contain the right information, as long as your post or page title does. Both of the plugins I mentioned, also help with the next few factors as well.

Description Meta Tag

Yeah, I know. You’ve probably only heard of this one. The Description Meta Tag is not something humans normally see, unless they are looking for it. It’s purpose is to speak to the *spiders* that crawl your site. It was originally designed as a helpful way to explain the content of the post or page.

When Google finds a description meta tag, it will use the first 160 characters to display the *description* that appears under the link when your site is returned in the results for a search term.

It is important to note this tag is more than a way to explain your content to the search spiders then…it’s a way to talk to your target market, and explain why they should come read your content.

If you don’t provide a description meta tag, Google will grab either the first 160 characters of your content, or 160 character near the keyword that was searched … to find your content. Leaving it for Google to *build* your description is a little like relying on someone who hasn’t seen the movie, to tell you if it worth seeing. Hmmm.

Keywords Meta Tag

This search engine optimization factor is getting some bad press, and experts are unable to agree on the validity and importance of this one. However, for years, Google, Yahoo and MSN used the keyword meta tag to help them weight your content based on the keywords found.

Here’s my thinking on this matter.

Having 3-7 of your main keywords related to the content in this tag won’t hurt you, and very well might still be ranked pretty high on the internal thinking of spiders who index your site.

Header Tags

I don’t want this to become a tutorial on HTML or anything silly like that, but you need to know something about how web browsers *read* the content and display it to you. They use a *tag* system that allows them to define how something will appear, on the fly. For example, to make the word bold, appear in bold in a sentence, an instruction (a tag) is placed right in front of the word and immediately following the word.

For example, this word will appear bold when read by a browser.

Now that you understand that concept (yeah right, clear as mud, right?), there are tags used by all browsers to display text at various heights. In fact, there is a standard set of header tags, numbering 1 through 6, (with 1 being the largest, 6 being the smallest) that every browser understands.

With me so far?

When you put a keyword in a header tag, it is given more *weight* on the relevancy scale, than that same word just appearing in the text. A header tag automatically tells Google it’s more important.

Alt Tags

An Alt tag is a small bit of text that is displayed in place of an image, until the image loads. Perhaps you have surfed a site and seen text just kinda hanging out in space, and then, when the page finished loading, a photo magically appeared instead of that text.

You are seeing the Alt tag at work.

Since photo’s can be large and take longer to download to the local surfer’s machine, Alt tags let them know something is coming.

However, the Google spiders crawl Alt tags and if your keyword is there, it’s like another small vote in your favor. Again, I remind you that Google is onto the *black-hatters* that stuff keywords in the Alt tag, just to get better rankings.

A good rule to follow would be to use the title as the Alt tag, and add the word photo. For example..you have a post called *7 Travel Destinations Everyone Can Afford*, and it displays a beautiful photo of the beaches of Fiji. For the Alt tag of that photo, insert the text *7 Travel Destinations Everyone Can Afford Photo*.

Please note, your photo names can also help your SEO. Just name the photo the same as the title as well, and add the word photo. For the photo name though, you will want to replace all spaces with dashes. Although there a couple of plugins I have seen for this task, I have had problems with them and the new version of WordPress. If I hear of one that rises back to the top again, I will let you know.

Link Text

Also called Anchor text, this is the text that is displayed when you include a hyperlink in your content.

Let’s say you have a site all about Pool Service. And within a blog post, you are sharing your experience with a great vendor that offers overnight delivery for their supplies. If you will include keywords within your text (rather than just *click here*), a few things happen for you.

• You have your keywords included again on your page (in natural sounding language)
• You are linking to an outside site (that might have a great page rank) that is related. So, you are *voting* for the other site.
• The vendor you are linking to get’s some business, making them happier with you
• Google sees you now, as more of an authority on the subject, since you are a linking to another known authority.

This habit is all on you. I know of no plugins to help with this process… just remember, the better the anchor text you highlight for a link, the better all around it will be.

Sitemap

I should mention that there are two types of sitemaps. One, is built for humans. The other, is built for the search engine spiders. I am referring to the one for Google here, although, it’s a really good idea to have a good sitemap for your visitors as well.

This one requires a bit of work unless you choose a plugin to handle it for you. In fact, I highly recommend using a plugin since getting the priorities, scheduling, category hierarchy and other obscure and difficult to follow factors go into this.

A sitemap built for Google looks like raw HTML code. In fact, it’s called XML and is a cousin to HTML. It basically recounts everything that Google can expect to find on your site. Again, unless you are really really into that geeky stuff, I highly recommend a plugin for your blog to handle this chore. Google XML Sitemaps is a good one that comes to mind.

Good Content

Obviously, this really should be weighted very high on the scale of things to do to bring visitors to your site. None of the Onpage optimizations you do will keep your visitors on your site or coming back like delivering some killer content.

Need a few ideas? Try Google Alerts.

Here are the links to the plugins mentioned above: 
All In One SEO Pack 
HeadSpace2

Getting your WordPress blog into Google can seem impossible. Some bloggers can get their WordPress blog into Google in a matter of hours, while others take weeks or months. While Google doesn’t reveal its exact algorithm for indexing, there are some methods that have been proven to work for many bloggers.

Of course, many bloggers think that first thing they should attempt to get their WordPress blog indexed is to submit it to Google. There is actually a lot of differing opinions on this point! Some bloggers think the Google look upon this favorably, and other bloggers think that hand submission won’t help at all.

My opinion is that it doesn’t seem to hurt your rankings, but Google know that it’s you who is submitting the blog. What they want are votes of confidence from other established websites or blogs. That’s why it’s better to forget about submitting your site to Google and to focus on getting backlinks from authority sites.

1. Not everyone has established sites, however, there are sites out there that accept your content on their site. Article directories are one example. If you submit an article to an authority site like EzineArticles.com with a backlink to your site in the author’s resource box, the chances are good that you will get indexed fast.
2. Another strategy that works well is to write great content and update your WordPress blog on a daily basis. There is no perfect formula for this, but we do know that Google loves new content! If you can write a few posts to show that your blog is going to be a useful resource then the chances are that your WordPress blog will get indexed.
3. Another effective method is to submit your RSS feed to RSS feed directories. There are RSS directories out there that inform services that your blog has been updated. This can improve your chances of getting indexed. Some useful sites include Feedagg.com and Feedage.com.

If you’ve tried one of these methods and still haven’t made it into Google then don’t give up. Usually a combination of a few of these will be effective. Also, its worth your while being patient as it’s not unusual to wait a week or more to get indexed! Still, by following the methods above you’ll find that you get indexed quickly and often.