In building upon my earlier post about “How to mine for content in an existing business”; I want to highlight some of the trials and obstacles that I had to overcome.

Old Media Formats

First and foremost is the evolution of data. I speak about Document files and those pesky old word processors that had their heyday in the Eighties and early Nineties. PFS write, WordPerfect, Ami, and others. Some of these packages did a good job and I actually liked PFS write. WordPerfect was a beast and I spent many hours in college working with the insert codes to get pages to print as required by each professor.

It is probably this background in the older versions of software that has allowed me to scavenge such large amounts of untapped content.

In my quest to repurpose data I have had to run the gauntlet of 5.25 floppies, 3.5 hard floppies, Zip drives from the 90’s, and mini-cartridge tape drives.

First thing I realized is that I had compatibility issues with old and new versions of software. To get around this I sorted all my data formats by date and then by software program. I then looked in the back closets, fire safes, and deposit boxes for old versions of the install software. It is amazing what you can find if you are willing to dig in the back of cabinets and get your hands dirty. If I could not determine the age of a disk or storage device by its label I simply set it aside until I had a machine parted up that would read the data source.

Next I located an old desktop machine that everyone considered too out of date to be useful. I did set limits on this and parted up one that would run Windows XP; I wanted to be able to run DOS based programs as well as Windows 3.1. Also having a thumb drive was extremely important for getting the old data to my everyday machine. Next I scavenged drives for tape, zip, and floppies from old cases and now had a true masterpiece of a machine. The drivers proved to be a bit problematic but the web is the best junk closet of all times. The 5.25 floppy drive was covered in dust and I had real doubts, but it worked.

Now I choose an install date that would work with the files creation date. My choice was to go with 1995. This worked because DOS based programs were still in use and Windows 3.1 was just starting to convert to Windows 95. XP allowed me to work efficiently up into the early 2000 as long as I did not tax the machine resources too much. It also let me work back into the late 80’s. I then installed old versions of the CorelDraw and PageMaker that were released on or near this date.

Being I had to deal with Corel Draw files for images and PageMaker for the text it was necessary to strip for graphics and text. Corel proved to be the most difficult.

At the time of creation all literature was saved in the format in which it was used. PageMaker was setup as the final presentation package and CorelDraw had all its image files saved as CDR with an EPS link to the PageMaker document. Unfortunately, once I was able to get the PageMaker document open I could not export or convert the EPS file with enough image quality to post to the web. This required me to open every image in CorelDraw 5.0 and then export. Another step added to the process but I now had raw images in a form I could use.

Once PageMaker was open I resorted back to good old Notepad. I spent a lot of time cutting and pasting text from PageMaker into Notepad but in the long run it was much faster than trying to retype or scan and reedit the copy. Notepad also cleaned all the text back to raw text format in one easy step. I decided very quickly it was better to start with clean text and reformat than try to preserve already existing formatting.

Now that I had the text and images I made certain to keep a copy of the text in raw text form. This will hopefully allow anyone 15 years down the road to re-access the files. As for the GIFs and JEPGs, time will tell. I tend to save in PNG format now but will have to take the chance that these formats stay around awhile.

So why go to all the trouble to get this old data from the vault?

Content is the driving force for any website and having hundreds of old articles containing industry keywords was a gold mine. The company is now able to supplement their blog environment for nearly two years with this content. It represents thousands of dollars that have already been spent and with minor edits will be useful for years to come.

It also lends itself to providing education for how the company’s industry has evolved. For new engineers entering the market they will have resource documents for already installed industrial products and be able to understand the transition from old to new.

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John Wilkerson is a Marketing/Sales Professional specializing in online branding, ecommerce sites, blogging, email advertising, content creation, print media, and direct mail. Follow @johnwilkerson

863-398-2199

JDW.Wilkerson@Gmail.com

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Recently I was in the process of looking for a new contract or staff position and have found some interesting acceptable behavior standards while searching. Granted I have not been on the job market for over 10 years and have always had a backlog of companies wanting to use my service. It has been an interesting adventure into the dark realms of Human Resources (play foreboding music now)

One of the positions I applied for advertised their submittal process as “quick and easy” I should have known not to be tempted by such a trusting sounding gimmick, but hey, I took the shot. What I came across was the standard upload of your resume. Correct the auto-populate fields and move forward.

Then I got to this section….

“Please take a few moments and answer the following questions related to the Web – Sr. Internet Marketer for XXXXXXX.com position which you are applying for. Answers to text only questions should be no longer than 500 characters. Your responses will be considered part of your application. “

Note: At the end of this post is the listing of items required to be completed for submittal of the form.

I really did put some effort into their answers but after the first two I pulled out the calculator and did a little math.

22 unique items to be answered

500 character per item max

11,000 characters total

@ 6 characters per word that yields about 1,800 words

This got me thinking, is it worth the effort to spend that amount of time writing 1800 words to submit to the HR black hole database or is it better to move on?

Granted, I could pull some of this info from my already existing master question sheet; but is it worth it to do the work? It seems to me that this organization has the belief that if they get all this information then they never have to speak with a live person. I am not sure I want to work with an organization that hides behind their website. Besides, the odds of them never contacting me and claiming that they are too busy are nearly 9:1. Once again, is it worth the effort?

Now how does this relate to my profession and SEO and SEM implementation? Instead of completing their questionnaire and creating content that personally promotes me to only one company, I could take what I learned from their submittal process and write this blog to promote my social media presence to the community at large.

It was not a hard decision, I used the experience to write this blog and hence promote my web presence by creating unique content. Plus,… all the fun backlinks that will come from other ecommerce marketers sharing my blog post.

Is this a risk? You bet. Many HR people will see this as just bashing and trashing. While in truth it brings to light that time management is important to all of us and we must make the decision to place our resources where they will do the most good.

Form Submittal Requirements

1. E-COMMERCE MANAGEMENT

2. SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING

3. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

4. AFFILIATE MARKETING

5. VIRAL/GRASS ROOTS MARKETING

6. SOCIAL/WEB 2.0 MARKETING

7. EMAIL MARKETING

8. OFFLINE MARKETING

9. WRITING WEB CONTENT

10. WRITING AD COPY

11. WRITING LANDING PAGES

12. WEB ANALYTICS

13. MARKETING PROJECT MANAGEMENT

14. TEAM LEADING

15. OVERSEEING OUTSOURCED PROJECTS

16. BASIC HTML SKILLS

17. GRAPHIC DESIGN

18. VIDEO PREPRODUCTION

19. If you have not already done so, please expound on some of your work/projects and provide sample documents or URLS or your work if available.

20. What are your salary requirements?

21. Why do you want to work for XXXXXXXXX?

22. Feel free to use this space to ask any questions that you have about the position:

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John Wilkerson is a Marketing/Sales Professional specializing in online branding, ecommerce sites, blogging, email advertising, content creation, print media, and direct mail. Follow @johnwilkerson

863-398-2199

JDW.Wilkerson@Gmail.com

http://www.johnwilkerson.com

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http://twitter.com/#!/johnwilkerson

The past week FaceBook has begun to weigh in on the employers wanting to gain access to prospective employee’s accounts. This reminds me of my earlier post about how Social Media will come back to bite Human Resources.

We as employees want some level of privacy for our daily lives. Employers want to make certain they don’t hire potentially crisis causing employees. Is there ever going to be a happy middle ground; not a chance!

If FaceBook really wants to support their privacy policy about password sharing and account access all they need to do is suspend the offending company accounts that are using the practice.  Let’s see if the 800 pound gorilla really wants to get involved or is just throwing out platitudes.

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John Wilkerson is a Marketing/Sales Professional specializing in online branding, ecommerce sites, blogging, email advertising, content creation, print media, and direct mail. Follow @johnwilkerson

863-398-2199

JDW.Wilkerson@Gmail.com

http://www.johnwilkerson.com

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I have recently been doing a review of the Wotsdoin.com social network. I will lead off by saying I am not a social network participation type guy. I like to get out and be active or if I am on the computer then it is for work or research. I do maintain some FaceBook profiles for work environments but I personally don’t live the social media platform lifestyle.

That being said, Wotsdoin is presenting an approach to counter FaceBook and the gripes power users are making concerning “Pay Us” we make FaceBook what it is and we want a piece of the money.

They are also touting their platform as one that is anti-bullying. In following their hosted anti-bullying link it takes you to a menu page that links to numerous national anti-bullying resource sites. When I first made contact with WD it was promoted heavily as an anti-bullying safe site. In looking at the anti-bully link I question how that decision has changed. If they are targeting the teen/tween market with an anti-bully safe platform it seems that a more prominent link location for reporting bullying would exist. In simplest terms how about a big red star that says “Report Bullies Here”

I spent some time poking around their site and actually read all the privacy and use policies. Not too much jumps out on their use conditions but you do need to be aware that if you have content, images, or anything else on your profile then they have the right to use that content for their own commercial gains. This is not necessarily a big issue but one that users need to be aware of and how it may impact their intellectual property. It would be nice if their policy limited their use of children’s images for Wotsdoin use if below a certain age limit. We as a society are still in the infancy of long term online privacy issues for underage children and what will float to the surface twenty years down the road.

Back to making money on WD – “Daily Deal Coupons -The Gist of it!” – They are offering a coupon earning option via participation. This has good potential for helping keep members happy and feeling empowered. As they launch and grow the site, getting mass market companies to participate in the coupon deals will be very important to the longevity of the program. It is great to see a social platform trying to keep its members happy and money always talks. What will be difficult is getting retailers to participate during the early months. With my background in contract negotiation their model has peeked my interest; I would love to be a fly on the wall for how they are setting up the retailers.

As for the mechanics of the site:

The first point that I took away is that there is no relationship status and the site is not driven by the teen mentality of BFF of boyfriend girlfriend. It is setup to be simple to use but is not focused on playing into the teen/tween social realities. This is fine but in my email conversations WD presented itself as anti-bullying. This led me to believe that it is focused on the teen/tween market. I am not sure what their target market is?

All the expected standard parts exist – friends, contacts, messages, events….. And I will say the site was fast. It is not uncommon for me to do initial reviews of sites and they just creep along. It nice to see that they are working for speed and meeting the short attention span for online users.

As an overall platform it functions but is not focused on a market segment. The coupon points has promise but without users is can’t drive the site. They need to focus on what their core business is and find a better way to meet their early needs and then add the coupons.

If I was to make one recommendation it would be – Make the site look and feel compelling to your target market “teen/tweens” and their families. The children’s lives and social activities drive the U.S. nuclear family. The site should visually and performance wise play into that.

Case in point – Farmville – It was originally designed for the youth market but mothers became its biggest users. How can Wotsdoin focus on the children and then have the mothers participate?

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John Wilkerson is a Marketing/Sales Professional specializing in online branding, ecommerce sites, blogging, email advertising, content creation, print media, and direct mail. Follow @johnwilkerson

863-398-2199
JDW.Wilkerson@Gmail.com
http://www.johnwilkerson.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/johndwilkerson
http://twitter.com/#!/johnwilkerson

Recently I have been working with a manufacture that has decided to establish a blog environment.

After several months of discussion as to how the site would function and what the target audience would be, effort was spent in the premises to create new content or re-purpose already existing content.

This program was used for a technical products company. How you would approach a more emotional type product like perfume is up for discussion.

It was decided to repurpose existing content and here is why:

• The business has been active for nearly 30 years. Long before the internet become the go to method of selling its products.

• The customer base for the products is educated engineers

• Education of the customer is very important and closing the deal via phone is still important.

With three decades of already existing content spread out across the facility, it became known that they could feed their blog for over a year with already created content. This content had never been online and was still as fresh and pertinent today as when it was originally created.

The search for content began in the most humble of methods.

First, all the bookshelves in the building were searched. This allowed the team to identify what each employee considered important to the function of their duties and create a master list of content ideas. In this search, old print magazines were also identified and logged.

Next the search went to the file cabinets. The identification of content in this section posed as many questions as it did answers. While lots of great information was found, when the sales order files were search this lead to the discussion of how to incorporate each sales staffs call notebooks into the content creation project. It was decided that while the notebooks might contain great information, the shorthand methods used to track customer calls was not up to spec when it came to identifying already nearly complete content. However, the weekly summary reports that each sales staff had to submit did prove to be better suited to blog content and a program is in the works to train sales staff to submit their weekly reports in a manner that will allow parts of the report to be directly usable as content.

Secondly, the search went to the media and graphic department. The obvious question is why did the search not start in media and graphics? Because most of the files are digital and while master paper copies did exist they were all filed as how media would consider important. In learning this, the team is also working on address the filing methods of media and how it needs to piggyback with the webmaster and digital media group.

What content was found?

Old adverting files – These files both paper and digital are a wealth of content. While they may be a bit short on key words and lots of text, they lay the foundation of how the blog must present information. It is important to note that the ads may not be used as originally printed; but they do act as the foundation for product ads that can be posted as blog content. They also act as ad-spots within the blog navigation section and will save countless hours of design work.

Application notes

Being the company in question sells technical products the necessity to publish application notes and white papers is very important. The website has historically hosted numerous app notes but over time the older paper versions were forgotten about. In re-identifying these old notes and papers it was found that just by doing light edits to bring the content up to date, the blog could be feed with one app note per week for over a year.

Magazine articles

Over the years the company has had numerous technical articles and interviews published in trade journals. Around the year 2000 when so many magazines made the move to a digital platform most all the older articles were not moved to the digital format. This has proved to a gold mine in content. The magazines that have been contacted are glad to allow their old content to be re-introduced to the web as long as certain conditions are met. How this is handled is that the company gets to place the article online first and get it indexed and then the old magazine company uploads it to their site. This gives the company first index position and they provide a tagline backlink back to the magazine. Everybody wins.

Company newsletters

As with most companies, newsletters come and go. But in looking at the many years of newsletters was very surprising. Most all contained a short article about one of the technical products written for a less engineer educated person. This proved to be very valuable in that while the article still had good key words that were industry specific, they also contained key words that purchasing agents and non technical people would use to search for technical products. This discovery helped bridge the gap between an engineer specifying product and having their support staff do product searches.

Sales Training Books

The education of the sales staff is very important and over the years several outstanding versions of the training manual were produced. Each book has allowed direct content to be lifted and repurposed as well as act as a roadmap for developing video and slideshows.

The real difficulty has been the buy-in from all staff members. It can be very disruptive to have people digging through what they consider to be their files. One method to deal with this is to have small contest to see who can remember and identify some hidden stash of content. Prizes can be small; it is the bragging rights that are the real prize.

More ideas of where to look for content from an earlier post

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John Wilkerson is a Marketing/Sales Professional specializing in online branding, ecommerce sites, blogging, email advertising, content creation, print media, and direct mail. Follow @johnwilkerson

863-398-2199 JDW.Wilkerson@Gmail.com

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A couple days ago I received an email from a company I visited at a trade show last year. It is time to go see them again next month and their well written email provided a direct link to register free tickets through their name.

Given the chance to save $100 bucks I clicked on the link without reading too closely. To my surprise their Ecommerce department had neglected to proofread the mail message and omitted the registration link. The link I followed was actually the unsubscribe link and I found myself removed from their mail list.

I feel sorry for the company in that they have invested so much time and money into developing this email list to have it suddenly be pared down due to a poor proofing job. I have no idea how many leads they had unsubscribe from the list due to this blunder but imagine if the enticement had been higher and a large portion of people followed the link.

This brings up some important issues on proofing:

Try to never do the final edit on a piece of literature and then send it to print on the same day. Sleep on the final edit and then review it with a fresh mind.

Have someone else and more than one person proof your work for you. And try to include a person not from the Ecommerce or Marketing department. They will have a totally different perspective on how the literature looks and functions.

Have a documented procedure for how the literature is to be proofed and who makes final signed approval. “In the past I worked with a firm where all literature had to be signed off by the President – they had only made one mistake to print in 30 years”

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John Wilkerson is a Marketing/Sales Professional specializing in online branding, ecommerce sites, blogging, email advertising, content creation, print media, and direct mail. Follow @johnwilkerson

863-398-2199
JDW.Wilkerson@Gmail.com

http://www.johnwilkerson.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/johndwilkerson
http://twitter.com/#!/johnwilkerson

Klout has received a lot of blog press lately and it mostly seems to revolve around Klout’s desire to rank online presence in the same way the big three credit rating bureaus rank individuals credit scores. They continue to run into an adamant group that speaks loudly about how Klout provides no real service and in fact is creating a false measurement for the online world.

It is interesting that the online community has not embraced Klout and tried to work with them in developing their product. Fore in the long run Klout is already here and will not go away. It may not be called Klout in 10 years but the model has been built and the desire by the non players to be able to measure the players has been identified.

This is the same with the credit bureaus. They have created an unfair playing field to measure and rank individuals credit worthiness and they did so in a vacuum. What would have happened if the consumers had united and started demanding different forms of checks and balances when the industry was developing?

I don’t mean to make an opinion positive or negative about Klout and what they are trying to accomplish but in the end this one fact will remain true.

” Klout is in business to make money and now that it is proven that money can be made ranking online personas; more companies will enter the market.”

It seems to me to stop trying to tear Klout down and instead create on open dialog with them that helps them create a truly inclusive and accurate product. This in turn will allow the industry to develop with guidance from the assets they are trying to measure.

I cringe every time a prospective client wants to run a credit check on me to determine if I am a worthy employee and the same is going to hold true in a few years where all Ecommerce players are hired or fired by their Klout score. Maybe we should help stack the deck?

For a little more reading on how Social Media will start to affect hiring practices checkout:

Social Media technology will one day come back to bite HR and Recruiters

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John Wilkerson is a Marketing/Sales Professional specializing in online branding, ecommerce sites, blogging, email advertising, content creation, print media, and direct mail. Follow @johnwilkerson

863-398-2199 JDW.Wilkerson@Gmail.com

http://www.johnwilkerson.com

http://www.linkedin.com/in/johndwilkerson

http://twitter.com/#!/johnwilkerson

I have had the joy of interviewing for new positions and/or contracts recently and am surprised with how the market has evolved the past couple of years. It has always been one of the HR black hole when submitting resumes or making initial phone calls but I am surprised with how HR and the hiring managers disappear even after a face to face interview.

This is going to be a dangerous slope for HR to continue to take due to the prevalence of Social Media. Soon someone is going to become so disgusted that they start leveraging big social sites in a way that does nothing but bash HR and Recruiters.

I don’t mention this as a bashing exercise of my own. Only that with Social Media being used by the organizations to research potential employees; it is probably a safe assumption that over time HR and Recruiters that are not responding to active job hunters will find their online persona become very damaging. And that will eventually lead to their inability to find work. Fore when they once again reenter the job market their online background search will yield the good and the bad of their handling of applicants.

It will be an interesting situation when potential employees start doing online background checks on the HR department employees as part of their job hunts. Of course all the standard liability and slander issues will exist, but some enterprising group is going to develop and add-on to LinkedIn that does nothing but log complaints about HR.

I would enjoy comments on this on my primary site so that I can post a follow up review in a few weeks. If you found this post on one of the sites that syndicates my post please feel free to leave comments on their site but I may not get to respond.

One of the first questions I ask during my initial consulting interview is how their merchant processing account works? I usually get a blank stare from the marketing team and they respond, “That’s accounting job.”

This if farther from the truth than one can imagine. Marketing and Sales need to understand the nuances and structure of how merchant processing works and how money moves around the web community. Case in point; awhile back I posted a job description for an ecommerce manager. The description dealt with only the capturing of new business and did not touch on the affects of how the new business would affect the company.

This may seem out of the normal scope of understand and responsibility for marketing but in actuality understanding how money moves and the new technologies of money gathering and payment portals operate is very important. My background is one of operations management, sales, and marketing. And I have learned over the years that when people understand how money is collect and moves they have a much better understanding of the Big Picture.

I come from an entrepreneurial background and an ongoing discussion in my family is do you hire a specialist or generalist? The answer to this is you hire both. When an organization is small to medium in size the generalist will have a better understanding of cross department interaction and the cause and effect issues. But when you need to get something done that is very precise and has a fixed amount of time you need a specialist.

It is without fail that when you bring in a specialist their learning curve for understanding the new business is much longer. They may produce more useable work for the assigned project but they are at more of a loss when it comes to the entire company interaction.

The reason I mention this is that even if you consider yourself to be a specialist in Ecommerce Marketing, your understanding of merchant processing is an important part of the job.

For example, when you are working with sales to package and advertise a new product line an important observation needs to be made. How will the new product deviate from the standard expected order size price?

The reason this matters is illustrated in these two examples:

Fixed charge of $.35 per transaction swipe rate and 2.5% of fixed rate:

2.75% swipe rate $.20 fixed rate:

At first observation it seems that all is well but when we look at the total cost for $1000 in products and how the number of transactions affects the total merchant processing charges it demonstrates the need to understand the swipe rate verses the fixed rate.

A higher swipe rate with a lower fixed rate works better for smaller order sizes while a higher fixed rate and lower swipe rate is better for higher order sizes and over the course of a year the difference really ads up.

What this leads to is if you end up changing your expected order size in a major way, effort needs to be made to understand how this will affect your loss of sale due to merchant processing charges.

As we move more and more to mobile charge transactions from our smart phones the issues become more and more heightened. If your merchant processor charges a different rate for smart phone charges and you are about to launch a new smart phone advertising program, you may be setting the company up for a higher loss on merchant fees than is expected.

The following steps are the basic starting point for a new blog. Many more techniques exist and can be utilized but these starter steps will get results and help you understand the process of Search Engine Optimization and how it relates to your blog.

Step One – Check that you’re in Google search

Go to Google search page and type “site:example.com” This will list your site pages that have been recognized by Google and are available to be searched via their search engine.

If Google has not placed your site in search you need to get an outside link from an established site to link to your site. Do this by identifying a high ranking blog and then commenting on a blog post from that blog. Don’t choose an old post; make it one that has been written within 5 days. Be sure to provide a link from the blog comment back to your blog.

To find a Blog to comment to, search via Google for topics that match your blogs topics and then select the blog tab at the left of the screen. This will cull all the search results to Blogs only. Then locate a blog and post that sounds good and enter the domain name into Alexa.com search. If the score comes back below 500,000 use that blog to try and get a backlink. The odds are that if the search result is on the first page of Google it probably has a good ranking in Alexa. But this is not always true.

Different opinions exist for how to measure and identify a well ranked site but the reason I mention using the Alexa score is that you may have picked some obscure topic in your search that in reality has very little written about it on the web. So if you check the other blogs location on Alexa, you have a better chance of getting success the first time.

For more reading on backlinks

Step Two – Develop your keywords and keep a handy list

All search engines will rank your blog post by identifying your keywords. It is important that you understand what your keywords should be and to use them efficiently.

Get out a sheet of paper and write down 10 words that are unique or semi unique to your industry, hobby, sport, or activity. Next do a web search for each of these words one at a time and see what comes up in the search engine. If the first few results for each word are yielding positive results then you probably found a keyword that will work for your writings.

Google Keyword Tool works well and is free. The best way to access the page is to search for “Google Keyword Tool” and then follow the link from the search result. The reason I have you doing the search for the Keyword Tool is that if you are signed into Google you may get a different link to follow than the one I would post here.

Once you have started to develop a list of keywords keep the list handy and use the words in your post. And over time when you learn more keywords, add them to your list. It may sound overly simple to keep a list of keywords on hand but you will be surprised how often you will have a memory lapse and find yourself only writing around a small group of keywords and not utilizing your full list.

Step Three – Using your keywords properly and in the right place

Every area of your blog article page has different power in how the search engines give credence to your keyword usage. If you follow this short list it will help you get the most return from your keyword usage. The list is in order of importance.

• Title
• Header 1
• Header 2,3,4,5…
• Body

Title – It is important that the title of your post includes some keywords

e.g. Chocolate cake recipe This is weak, while you do have three strong words they lack the substance for making them unique.

Try this:  Easy Chocolate cake recipe like grandma use to make

While you still have the three keywords from the first title, adding the word “easy” helps define how people think and will search for recipes. The same holds true for “grandma”

Now when a search is done for “easy chocolate cake recipe” or “grandmas chocolate cake” you have a better chance of being found.

This takes a bit of practice and understanding how people search the web. We tend to search like we speak and ask questions to our friends and family. It is important to not only use your keywords but words that define your topic in ways that live people speak, think, and will write in the search box.

My personal observation is that people who read a lot for pleasure, education, or work tend to search the web better than those who don’t. I theorize this to the fact that they think in standard structured sentences with a noun and a verb from all their exposure to the written word; whereas people who read less speak in more broken sentences with a higher use of emotional expressions such as OMG.

More reading on titles

Header 1 or H1 Tag – how to use properly

Where the title defines the topic for an entire page, the H1 tag defines the content that is just below the tag. When you open a printed book and read the title for the book on the inside cover sheet, this is the main title. Next comes the chapter titles, these are the H1 tags. They are very powerful in identifying your content and the search engines use them to help classify and understand what is on the page.

It is important to use a sub variant of your keywords in your H1 tags.

For example, these are the H1 tags for this page up to this point:

• Step One – Check that you’re in Google search
• Step Two – Develop your keywords and keep a handy list
• Step Three – Using your keywords properly and in the right place

Header 2,3,4,5… or H1,2,3,4,5… – proper use and why so many

Several layers of H tags exist. As you move away from H1 they carry less importance in identifying your content. The higher numbers are still important but in reality I find that I usually only use H1 and H2 for my blog post. If I was doing a full white paper  with many pages of information I would go deeper into my H tags but in doing short blog writing, H1 and H2 are they only ones I tend to use.

My H2 tags up to this point:

• Title – It is important that the title of your post includes some keywords
• Header 1 or H1 Tag – how to use properly
• Header 2,3,4,5… or H1,2,3,4,5… – proper use and why so many

Body – the real content for the blog article

This is where you put all the great information for your writings. It is where most people start by just laying out words without following any real outline. Not following an outline is fine as long as you are capable of writing long sentences and paragraphs that make since. If you question your ability to write, then read your work out loud to yourself. You will be surprised how it sounds different than when you read it with your inner voice.

The web community has an expression that content is king. This is mostly right. Great content is king but poor content just takes up space and time. You need to give thought to what you write and here is where your keyword list comes in handy.

Once you have your topic, try and write between 200 and 500 words around that topic. And as you write, use your keywords as part of your sentences. Tell a story, provide education, answer a perceived question, or just spout out your opinions; but whatever you do you must use your keywords. Not always all your keywords but you must use some of them.

A tip for writing for the web community is to not use overly long paragraphs. This is not how you were taught to write in school where all the sentences that dealt with the same concept were grouped together. The reason we breakup the paragraphs is that on the computer screen it is easy to get lost when too many sentences are placed in one paragraph.

To ease this problem, break down your paragraphs into smaller units. My personal preference is to not have more than 5 or 6 lines of text in a single paragraph.

Step Four – Tag your post

Now that you have taken all the time to create your blog post it is important that you define your post for search engines. Yes you have done this to some degree by using good keywords and H tags but one more step exists and don’t skip this step.

Your blogging software will allow you to place tags somewhere on the new post creation page. You must place good quality keywords in that little box. When you place these tag words in the box what you are doing is assigning predefined words that classify your blog post. These words will be used by the search engines to help classify the post and bring importance to the post for those tagged keywords.

My tags for this page will be something like this:

Content creation, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Blog Writing, Tips for Blogs, Keywords, Content Tags, H1 Tag, Google Search Results, Backlinks

You can see that many of my keywords are in these tags but I also used action words to help match how people will search the web. E.g. “Tips for Blogs”

Summary

These tips are not the only means to help build your blog site but they are the most important ones for new bloggers.  What we have covered is how to define your content via a quality title, proper tag usage, and how to develop keywords and use them in you content.

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John Wilkerson is a Marketing/Sales Professional specializing in online branding, ecommerce sites, blogging, email advertising, content creation, print media, and direct mail. Follow @johnwilkerson

863-398-2199 JDW.Wilkerson@Gmail.com

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