To some smaller organizations, the decision to add a blog to their website isn’t a hard one. What about those larger, more conservative companies? They stand to lose a lot more and aren’t generally a fan of the risk factor. Their fear is well justified though – employees have been dooced for posting confidential information or information that would be embarrassing to the organizations they worked for. Many companies are mainly worried about losing control of their company message and reputation.

However, there are many advantages to blogging for your business. They’re great for bringing traffic and links to the company website as well as promoting new products or services. Search engines love web pages that are constantly updated and include a lot of content - a blog caters to these search engine obsessions. A blog is also an easy way to measure success and receive feedback on a business’ products and services as visitors can easily comment (unless this is opted out of) on posts and link back to information they find valuable or interesting.

Before starting a company blog there are several things to consider. For example who will write for the blog? Should there be rules for writers? Which blog software should be used? A full-time blog takes a lot of work to maintain and writing interesting or valuable posts at a consistent rate can be difficult for any one regular employee to maintain. However if several employees are to contribute to the blog then it would be wise to establish some guidelines and policies for them to follow while writing. Staff availability and dedication is something that is essential to a successful corporate blog. Depending on the size of the company and how active the blog will be there are several different choices for blog software platforms. Some popular choices tend to be Wordpress, Blogger, and Typepad.

Even though there are several risks to starting a blog for large companies there are also a few ways to mitigate that risk by adding things such as comment and post moderation – so that nothing goes live until it has been approved. Another way is to determine a low-risk focus to the blog while keeping it interesting and valuable to the readers. This keeps employee bloggers focused on safe topics that are unlikely to cause any large ruckus in the blogosphere.

Blogging for a business tends be very beneficial to companies if it’s done properly and with care - rushing into a decision such as this is likely not a good idea. If you plan on starting a blog for your business I highly recommend reading Publish and Prosper: Blogging for Your Business by DL Byron and Steve Broback, as it will give you a great base for business blogging the smart way.

Copywriting for the web is an exercise in balance. Too wordy, and you’ll lose the attention of your audience. Too short, and you aren’t providing enough substance to sustain repeat visits.

The conundrum gets more complex when SEO is also a goal for your website. The reason is that text-based content is the food of search engines. As a result, content that is keyword rich is sure to get you some headway when it comes to search engine optimization. However, it isn’t as simple as loading a page with keywords.

The key to copywriting for SEO is balance. There are 4 factors to consider:

Keyword Density
Keyword density refers to the quantity of keywords seeded in your content, compared to non keyword phrases. Too many keywords in your content and you will do more harm than good. We recommend no more that 5% keywords.

Readibility
SEO will only get visitors to your website, it won’t make them stay. Misplaced keywords and unnecessary content will only frustrate your readers once they get there. Good well-written content will help encourage your website visitors to stay, explore, and even return again later, rather than bounce right off to the next site.

Value
Google values content, but it also highly values in bound links to your site. Link-based popularity means that other people like your site enough to link from their site to yours. To gain this popularity, you need to create value for your website visitors, not just for search engines.

Popularity
In-bound links not only help SEO, they also help drive website visitors to your site from referring websites. This is a great endorsement, and one that harnesses the true power of the web – your website visitors spreading the message about your website simply because they like it.

In order to fully optimize a website for search engines, it is necessary to do a full and thorough evaluation of relevant information about the website. This can often be a long and tiring task but several tools and resources can help make your job a lot easier. I’ve put together a list of the top 3 tools that help you gather information easier and faster than on your own.

Google Analytics
Google Analytics gets top marks in my books because it is not only a helpful tool for search engine optimization, but for user experience and information architecture. By adding the Google Analytics code to your website, you can track not only your page views, but also what your users are searching for, how they’re finding your website, how long they’re staying, and even the path they take as they navigate your website content. Other useful information includes a dynamic map that displays the geographic location of your website visitors, globally as well as locally. Another useful (and fun) feature is a site overlay that shows you exactly where people click when they visit your website. Yes, I love this tool.

Search Engine Simulator
How does a search engine view your website? Now you can find out. With this Search Engine Simulator tool, you can see your website the way that a search engine robot does: no images, no flash; only text. It is an enlightening experience! This is a good way to evaluate simple changes to improve your site, such as rewriting content to add meaning to often over-looked text, such as footer navigation and copyright statements. There is no sign up, simply submit your website address to the simulator, and immediately see the results – and learn from them. Now you can see like a search engine robot, and your website will love you for it.

SEO website grader
Are you curious how your website compares to your competitors? SEO website grader evaluates not only your website, but also those of your competitors. You can see how each site is valued by search engines for content, keywords, site structure, … It can be a humbling experience, but also exceptionally useful – it takes the guess work out of understanding your website, and how it matches up to the competition. You can learn from this tool, and from your competitors – and you can improve your SEO.

When I write a blog I like to attempt to add some fun activities or tidbits of information here and there – it makes things interesting. What is today’s activity you ask?

Go to Google and type in “Untitled Document”. How many results do you get? I got 44,500,000 search results and I have no doubts that you got more.

As Leigh mentioned in his 'SEO for small business' post, title tags are very important for the search engine optimization of a website. Websites get launched daily without title tags. This is often due to forgetfulness or bad habits on the web developer’s part. Could be a result of being rushed too. When a new HTML document is created, most of the time using templates, it includes a title tag of “Untitled Document”.

No matter what you’re selling, advertising, or wanting users to see, getting anywhere near to #1 under any keywords with an untitled document is not likely to happen and your target users are not going to find you.

Title tags aren't just for search engines either. They are viewed by your website visitor in a few prominent places:

• text that appears within the blue bar at the top of a browser window.
• On browser tabs, the title is also what appears in the tab.
• When a website visitor minimizes the browser window, the title tag is what is appears.
• The title is also what appears on the first line of search results in the major search engines.

The best SEO practices also keep in mind the benefit for your website visitors. Provided good meaningful title tags will help your visitors, as well as your search engine rankings.

So be free my friends – go and give the gift to yourself of properly named title tags and watch your website climb the rankings in the search engines.

Today’s topic is about CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and why it’s a better option for developing a website with good search engine optimization.

Spiders are sent out by search engines to crawl websites and index them in the search engine’s databases. These spiders use what is called “top down” logic, which means they index websites and crawl the content from the top of the source code to the bottom. Considering this, developing websites using techniques like tables and frames hinder your search engine optimization, because they add bulky unnecessary code that makes it harder for a search engine to read.

Using external CSS separates content from presentation which in turn will put the content higher in the source code. This also makes for less code altogether, making it easier for spiders to index apparent important information displayed through tags such as headers and titles.

Separating content from presentation also provides more time for making changes to presentation and/or content without searching through an endless sea of code, leaving more time to update the website with new and fresh content and/or presentation. Making updates, another thing search engines love!

Search engine spiders, as much as we’d like to believe of robotic things, are not stupid. Spiders can see the tricks you try to pull, so adding extra content with keywords and using CSS to hide them won’t help your ranking (putting white text on a white background for example).

Another thing that weighs down website code is JavaScript. Developers sometimes use JavaScript to make flashy navigation and menus; however, remembering the “top down” theory, this doesn’t help the spiders find your content. Good navigation and menus can be made just as easily using CSS and they don’t weigh down the code like JavaScript does, so it’s definitely an option to think about when developing your website.

So, in conclusion,

• DO separate content from presentation using CSS
  
• DON’T try to cheat the search engines by hiding content with CSS
  
• DO use titles and header tags
  
• DON’T use too much JavaScript where you can use other methods such as CSS
  
• DO keep the “top down” theory in mind
  
• DON’T write messy, hard to read code
  
• DO update websites often

As mentioned in my previous post about Flash and SEO goals, the use of Flash needs to be evaluated on a case by case basis for each website project. When making this evaluation, keep in mind a new idea that I just found for Flash that help your website look better, helping it pop a little more than others, but without sacrificing SEO. It’s called sIFR, or Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, and it makes your fonts pretty.

Basically, sIFR uses a combination of JavaScript, CSS, and Flash to find and replace all the text that you specify to be whatever font you like. This means not being restricted to fonts like Times New Roman and Helvetica while still remaining accessible, search engine friendly, and semantic.

In addition to accessibility, sIFR can also be selected, copied, and pasted by users and the load time is virtually nothing – the average user has no idea anything different than usual is going on behind the scenes. Plus, sIFR is compatible with Mac, Windows, and Linux with JavaScript turned on and Flash 6 or greater installed. It also works on all major browsers (IE, FireFox, Safari) as well as even some minor ones (Omniweb, Konqueror).

What’s great about sIFR is that, as I mentioned earlier, it remains semantic. Research proves that websites made with semantic and clean code rank higher in the search engines than those that use deprecated code and that are hard to scan. Even Matt May of the W3C endorses sIFR as an accessible method to create rich typography on the web.

Please keep in mind that sIFR is meant to help the design process and to help pages pop out more. This doesn’t mean creating all your content using sIFR. You don’t want to get overzealous and ruin a web page by using too many type faces. Exercise restraint – think carefully about the design and how you can use sIFR to compliment the page. Headlines, pull quotes, or other small passages of text are good examples. Accent web pages with sIFR, don’t bombard them.

Although Flash is a highly sought after medium for websites these days, it may not be the best for search engine optimization. Think of website text as food for a search engine. Search engines 'feed' on many different things, but the most important thing is the keyword rich content. Flash does not provide text-based content for search engines to spider, thus it needs to be used in moderation and in places which still allow good amounts of content to be seen by the search engine spiders.

However, on July 1st 2008, Adobe announced it is teaming up with search industry leaders (like Google and Yahoo!) to improve the search results of dynamic web content (like Flash) and rich internet applications. This means better indexing by search engines and a higher ranking (hopefully) for most flash websites.

This does not mean, however, that you should go nuts with Flash. From a design perspective, although Flash can give that “wow” factor people want, it still needs to be evaluated for effective website usability. Flash should provide "wow" within the context of the user goals for the website content. For example, our Citrus SEO homepage features a prominent banner for Flash case studies, to drive website visitors deeper into the website content.

My recommendation? Evaluate the use of Flash on a case by case basis to balance your SEO goals, business goals, and user goals for your website.