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The first session of the day, which was surprisingly full. The session started out with Amanda Wattlington, describing blogs and what you need to decide before you set up your blog:
sub-domain vs. sub folder
which platform?
How do you optimize your blog? Well you should consider optimizing and customizing the CMS, do the same with your RSS feeds, conduct and apply keyword tagging. She presented other tips such as having optimized heading tags, adding robots.txt, favicons and sitemaps. Plan for blidgets (blog widgets). Wordpress for example has a number of beneficial plugins that can be useful.
When optimizing your feeds, determine how many are appropriate, increase the feed from 10 to 20 if you have frequent posts, decide how you are going to handle your multimedia content. Also manage your feed through things such as Feedburner. Use the title in the feed. Keep your description to 500 characters to 500 or less. Offer an html version of your feed. Add your logo and images for branding.
Socialize your blog well with buttons, notify other bloggers and join the conversation to promote your blog. Become a link hub and make it a real resource. Amanda said "Keep the Mojo going". Plan for the continuity. It's a lot of work to maintain a blog, but the results can be worth it. continue to post original material often. Edit the comments. Strive to get the most out of your blog that you can.
Up next was Lee Odden from TopRank Online Marketing. He started out with some interesting stats from Technorati. He stated that blogs can add great content and can be effective marketing tools for your site and for your business. Lee showed us a couple of case studies where blogs were highly successful in creating an informal communications platform to present issues that were important to the target market. The use of blogs helped the site owner get involved with their target market's community.
Blogging has helped Lee's team develop thought leadership and increase their visibility in the online space. Through blogging, media coverage for Lee's company has been featured in Profit, Fortune, B to B and others to name just a few. Some great case studies to show just how effective blogging has been for three different companies. Takeaways from Lee's presentation:
Goals for your blog should drive content.
Try to automate SEO as much as possible.
Socialize
Measure
Refine and Repeat
Next up was Chris Boggs touched on keeping links live and including the right words. He started out with the fact that you should try to host your blog on your own domain. Some initial tips included, fixing any broken links and keeping your links live. He mentioned that you should take the time to keep your links live and up to date. PR Web is a great resource where apparently the links will remain as optimized to other news site such as Yahoo News or others. Other tips that Chris mentioned included: trying for the brand site if liking to a press release. Keep track of links in archived articles, fix your broken links, be proactive with comments.
The final speaker was Daron Babin, CEO of Webmaster Radio. Daron discussed Podcast and Audio Search. Daron started out by saying that he hates blogs and open source. He stated that you should take a risk, build something on your own and see what happens. He was quite entertaining as he enlightening the crowd with his "black-hat" techniques from way back when. Daron discussed the importance of optimizing your feeds. Be Feedburner "whores". Choose the content that you add to Feedburner fields very carefully. Mefeedia is a great resource for optimizing feeds. Article promotions are another great way to promote your content through feeds. Be smart with your optimization. Focus on your keywords. Automation is key so that you can easily optimize your content. Take the time to customize your feeds. Again mentioned was Feedburner as a good tool to measure the effectiveness of your feeds. Use your auto discovery tag to help improve the trust rank over time. Some interesting and questionable tips which apparently work for optimizing your feeds.
It was a pretty cool session with some great beginning tips for user and site owners who are looking to get into blogging and feed optimization.
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