Surprised to find out that good SEO is more about good content than good web design alone?  Well, it’s true.  Many web designers will tell you that they’re going optimize your site to achieve top search engine rankings—and while their intentions might be perfectly legit—the fact of the matter is that a site’s SEO-friendly design & development really only serves to support excellent, keyword-rich content to be contained within a site.

At least that’s the quick version anyway.  Regardless, now that we have that common misconception out of the way, we should move on to the real bread and butter of getting higher search engine rankings…writing good, keyword-rich content.

What Are The Standards Of Good Keyword Optimized Web Copy?

Writing good SEO-friendly copy for your website will generally be a matter of customizing to specific site needs on a site-by-site basis.  However, there are some rather steadfast guidelines to follow:

Keyword Research First – It’s impossible to write good keyword-rich content without having specific knowledge beforehand on which keywords and keyword phrases you’ll utilize.  Many start their research by using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to come up with ideas for some high demand, low supply keywords to use.  Regardless of the method, you’ve got to pick topically relevant keywords to use first.

Write Naturally – Some “over-optimizers” used to suggest that the best way to rank well with good keyword rich content was to use a certain keyword density, or in other words, an exact percentage of how many times the keyword was used in the copy compared to the overall word count.  This is nonsense these days—could even be implied as spam—so avoid.  Instead, try to create a helpful piece of content that you would write regardless; it’s best to write naturally and then maybe go back and add in the keyword phrase you’re optimizing for a few times where it fits optimally.  Never, never over use it on purpose though.

Optimize Your Title & Headings – Definitely use the keyword phrase exactly once within the page’s title.  This is super-important.  You might also use it naturally in a heading or sub-heading within the page copy.  Other than that, just remember: keep it natural.

Use Similar Keywords – If you’re writing a topic focused piece of web content or blog post, chances are already good that you’re using lots of natural related lingo throughout the copy in addition to your optimized keyword or keyword phrase.  This is good—you’ll want to have a few appropriate related keyword variations and relevant similar keywords within the copy.  Again, though, this is almost instinctual anyway when writing topically-focused web content.

The Bottom Line – Keep it natural, natural, natural.  Write what your visitors want to read.  Be sure to answer questions they’re asking and address concerns they might have.  Really work hard to put yourself in the mindset of your target visitor when writing.  By all means, build the content around a specific keyword—and ideally focus on just one main featured keyword per page or post.  But at the same time, never push it to the level of becoming unnatural or spammy.

Follow these simple steps to writing good, keyword-rich content—and of course, make sure your web designer has paid attention to the important supporting factors within the design & development.  With this strategy in mind, you’ll be well on the way to getting higher search engine rankings.

Choosing the right blog platform is not always that easy—not that it really should be all that difficult either.  Here’s the thing…between the major blogging platforms out there, many get confused as to what these systems and services actually offer and how they work.  Let’s try and clarify the confusion here a bit if possible…

The Big 3 Blogging Platforms

WordPress

Extremely popular among its users and professional web developers alike, the WordPress blog platform has certainly earned its position at the front of the pack.  Often a significant point of confusion, though, is the fact that there are actually two different variations of WordPress out there—WordPress.org and WordPress.com.

For those looking for a standalone blog system that’s free and already hosted, WordPress.com is the answer.  While this is great for those just testing the waters with blogging, mostly because it’s free and easy, there are drawbacks.  For example, going this route more or less ties you to using their system, their hosting, and often, their domain—the dot com version of WordPress is not very flexible for developers and power-users.

Enter WordPress.org.  For those wanting to integrate a top-tier blogging system with their websites—or perhaps even use the system to power their entire site—the dot org version of WordPress is hard to beat.  Dot-org WordPress is actually extremely stable and robust open source software that you have to install on your own hosting provider (that must meet certain requirements).  From there, a developer is free to customize and integrate to their heart’s content.  This is probably why WordPress.org is becoming as extremely popular as it is.

Blogger

Blogger is Google’s entry into the blogging market.  While it’s hard to fault what comes from Google, this platform isn’t as pro-friendly as some of the others.  In other words, it’s created more for the average consumer—the person that just wants to start blogging without having to mess with all kinds of complex setup or anything of the sort.

Blogger is free—and most Blogger sites are hosted and reside on the service’s own servers.  From the standpoint of simplicity, all you’d really need to get started is to log in with a Google ID, pick a name for your blog, and pick a blog theme from the array that they offer.

Downfalls to Blogger?  Well, even though it was pretty much the first, it has lost some popularity with power-users due to fact that it simply isn’t as well-featured or easy to integrate with an existing site (like WordPress is).

TypePad

TypePad is another reasonable popular blogging platform.  As one of the top tier blogging systems out there, it adds a nice alternative choice to the above mentioned platforms.  While it’s secure, works as it should, and offers a good choice of quality designs to choose from, it is a subscription-based service with fees beginning under $10 per month.

This blogging platform can be integrated with your own existing website or can also be used as a stand-alone option through their provided hosting.  However, even when integrated into a third-party site, users still must manage the blog through TypePad’s service—this can be a hindrance for some.  The bottom line is that it’s probably worth a try if you’re not satisfied with the other options out there, even though it really doesn’t stand out as a best pick option for many.

Our Pick?

We knew you’d ask!  Here at Sleepless Media, we choose to use WordPress.org almost exclusively.  It integrates beautifully with our customers’ websites—and customization is practically unlimited.  Then there’s the fact that it’s been designed and tweaked from the ground-up by a passionate team of open-source developers to be faithfully SEO-friendly.

There’s a massive user-base out there, so any bugs or security flaws are quickly found and worked out by the masses—this also means that there are very frequent revisions and updates releases.  Not to worry though, because the platform integrates a one-click update option.  Just like “there’s an app” these days for pretty much anything, the same goes for WordPress.org—there’s a plug-in available to allow pretty much anything you can imagine.

Oh, and to top it all off, did we mention that WordPress.org is free?  It’s certainly hard to argue with this pick when the possibilities are nearly endless and the cost to access this excellent software is zero.  Although customizing, integrating with websites, and further development do come with a nominal price for time, skills, and expertise, all in all, the cost is kept to a minimum thanks to the head start from WordPress.

1. Goals.

Without specific goals in mind (in other words, a list of the exact traffic measurements and figures you’d like to achieve), effectively grasping quality SEO results is a misnomer.  Without goals, you might get there, or you might not…the thing is, you’ll never even know one way or the other.  The key to success is carrying out your optimization plans with focus and aim, through measurable and definable goals.

2. A Plan.

Yes, in order to be as SEO-friendly as possible, every website with this vital ambition in mind needs a plan to achieve the actual results they desire.  We make business plans when starting and growing our businesses, we use blueprints to build our homes—why not carefully craft a written game plan for SEO too?

3. Keywords.

Moving on from the conceptual things your website needs to succeed with SEO to the more tangible items used to carry out the plan, we definitely need to include keywords.  Every page of an SEO-friendly website is ideally optimized around just one or two unique keyword phrases.  This means the written content, the meta-data, the image tags, and so on.  Part of your SEO plan will be developing a list of targeted keyword phrases to utilize on your site (and defining where they’ll go).

4. Clean Web Structure.

Using squeaky-clean HTML/PHP/CSS coding (not Flash) is the way to go when creating a website structure that’s extraordinarily SEO-friendly.  Search engines really like to see attention to detail in the coding—this means being fully standards-compliant whenever possible.  Clean web structure serves two purposes with the search engines.  First, they’re able to crawl and index your site better because it is easy for their “robots” to understand.  And secondly, they know that if you pay attention to the details, you’re most likely offering a better quality site than your competitors that don’t follow this principle.

5. Great Content.

What do your visitors come to your site to see?  Content.  What do search engines help their users find?  Again, content.  Coincidence?  Not at all.  Provide great quality content—always go above and beyond and strive to make it perfect.  Be informative, yet different than the masses.  Offer your visitors what they’re looking for and over-deliver in every way with content.

6. Title Tags.

Moving on to the picky details of SEO, there’s one small technical detail that undoubtedly makes more of an impact than all the others combined.  Look at the very top left of your web browser’s window…okay, did you look yet…what does it say?  This is the page’s title tag—and it’s vital to a web page’s SEO-friendliness.  It should be brief, to the point, descriptive of the page’s content, and it should contain the page’s optimized keyword.  Search engines use this to understand your page and also to help them describe what your page is all about to their visitors.  If nothing else, be sure to get this one right.

7. Additional Meta-Data.

Other behind the scenes Meta-data like your page’s Meta-description, Meta-keywords, and image tags are often dismissed these days as being unnecessary.  This couldn’t be further from the truth—search engines today might not take this information verbatim, but it does help define the overall focus of your website’s pages.  It also helps with usability—which is another plus-factor when it comes to SEO-friendliness.  Don’t get spammy with Meta-data or “over-optimize” it, but do be sure to use it accurately for what it was intended for.

8. Balanced Link Profile.

For many SEO-spammers, achieving a great “PageRank” is viewed as the holy grail.  Ignore this strategy and instead focus on building a super high quality balanced link profile instead.  This means achieving a variety of natural incoming links (backlinks) to your site from a good cross-section of relevant authority sites when possible.  And the part that many forget is that it also means sharing a few outgoing links from your own site when they’re helpful to your visitors.  Search engines are smart enough to know that sites with a huge number of incoming links only—especially when they’re built really quickly—are suspicions and unnatural.  Being this is undesirable for sure, because search engines only want to share healthy, natural, organic quality sites with their visitors.

9. Great Navigation.

Having crystal clear navigation throughout your site is extremely important in order to be SEO-friendly.  Your visitors need to be able to make their way around your site with complete confidence.  But also an important factor, the search engine bots also need to be able to crawl your site with ease.  A great navigational structure will help you achieve both.  Also accurately listed under this category is including a search engine friendly sitemap within your website.

10. Activity.

What good is a perfectly SEO’d website if there’s just not any activity there?  Visitors want a vibrant, fresh website environment full of new and updated content (and the search engines know this).  Accordingly, the search engines do give favor to sites that are updated on a regular basis—sites that are full of activity.  One helpful way of achieving this, of course, is to include a blog section in your site.  Keep it professional…but keep it lively as well to look alive to the search engines.

At the initial sight or sound of the two-word terms “web design” and “web development,” it is understandably easily to assume that they are one in the same.  Or at least similar, for that matter.  But really, the two major parts that go into the creation of a website are substantially different from each other.

How about a few comparisons that help to explain web design vs. web development:

• Web designers are artists; Web developers are geeks (in a good way, of course).
• Web design is an art; Web development is a science.
• Web designers are architects; Web developers are builders.
• Web design is creative; Web development is technical.
• Web designers are right-brained; Web developers are left-brained.

The list could on, but these examples will probably suffice for now—and hopefully provide some initial clarity on the relationship between web design and web development.

What Does Web Design Involve?

Web designers basically practice a unique brand of graphic design.  Great web designers are creative artists that know how to bring design together perfectly with goals and desires in order to “paint a picture” that draws the visitor’s eye.  Web design is all about getting the colors right and getting the shapes and sizes right; it focuses on images, fonts, and where they should be on the page.  And naturally, it combines all of the elements found throughout a website into one cohesive look & feel.  Web design really is an art!

What Does Web Development Involve?

Web developers take the graphical web design—the look and feel, if you will—and make it work.  Web development is all about coding, software programming, and making the technical aspects of a website work exactly the way they should.  It also typically involves the ensuring that security and web hosting are setup and implemented just the way they should be…and that everything works well together from a functionality perspective. Your web developers are the mad scientists behind the scenes that bring the designer’s vision to life.

Now, For The Kicker…

Some web designers are also great web developers; and some web developers are also very proficient at web design.  If that sounds confusing, just remember, like anything in life, sometimes the right side of the brain and the left side of the brain work together in perfect harmony.  As a full-service web firm, here at Sleepless Media, we happen to be harmoniously proficient at both the art of design and the science of development.

Why Is Balance Between The Two Practices So Important?

You’ve probably seen websites that come across as way too technical and logical.  On the other hand, you’ve surely run across websites that theoretically look fantastic—but then they don’t work correctly or jam up your entire computer.  Either of these scenarios can happen when balance between design and development is off-kilter.

The bottom line is that in order for a web design to work, in order for it to achieve and carry out the goals expected of it, a fine-line combination of both web design and web development must be implemented with great care.

Trying to find the right shopping cart solution for your website?

On the surface, the task might seem like it will be fairly easy—after all, just about everyone on the web offers a shopping cart solution these days.  GoDaddy has a shopping cart system you can purchase; same goes for 1&1, Yahoo!, and so many other web service providers.  Factor in the concept that many of these kinds of shopping cart services and instant storefronts can be had for about $20 a month, and it can sometimes look like an obvious choice.

But nothing is really ever that easy is it?

Here’s a more typical scenario that fits with what so many customers have expressed to us over the years as they decide to pursue a better solution:

Step One: Find a discount “one size fits all” shopping cart service that can be added on to or integrated with an existing website for just $19.99 a month.

Step Two: Sign up for said service, wait several months before finding the time to learn how to use and setup the new shopping cart system.

Step Three: Begin to set everything up, only to find out that it’s not going to integrate with the website quite as expected (but that’s okay, with some modification and tweaking, it just might work after all).

Step Four: Tweak, adjust.  Tweak, adjust.  After several weeks’ worth of making changes to and playing with all of the options, it looks like the discount shopping cart system is all set to go.  It finally works with the site.  Well, mostly, anyway.

Step Five: Begin uploading products to the shopping cart software.  This could be simpler, but after a couple more weeks’ worth of effort, it’s just about done.  Oh, and the E-commerce system is only going to allow a portion of the pictures you’d like to use for each product.  But at this point, it will just have to do.

Step Six: Launching the system live on the website is finally scheduled to take place in just a few days.  But now, there’s a pesky security certificate issue that just won’t seem to resolve itself.  Tech support for the shopping cart service keeps referring to an online help article that is totally unrelated to the problem that’s being experienced.  Very dissatisfied and frustrated right now…

Step Seven: After what has now been about seven months, the shopping cart system is still not working correctly.  The launch of the new website has been drastically postponed.  Let’s just scrap the whole thing and start over fresh from the beginning.

Step Eight: Call Sleepless Media.  Problem solved.  Should have done this about 7 months ago!

As you can see, subscribing to a one size fits all shopping cart system usually ends up being way more trouble than it’s really worth.  It’s never as quick or easy as promised.

Those who do find initial good results with pre-packaged E-commerce software almost always eventually discover that it just doesn’t offer the flexibility and scalability that they demand.  And then, there’s the whole customer/technical support issue (or lack thereof, to be more specific).

Do yourself a favor and give us a call here at Sleepless Media before being forced to experience the scenario expressed here first hand.  We can help with a true professional custom solution that perfectly fits your needs and can grow effortlessly in the future too (and, you might actually be surprised to find out that utilizing our expert knowledge isn’t quite as expensive as you might have thought either).

Now this is as tough question.  Facebook vs. Twitter…which one is best to use as a social media promotional tool for your organization’s website (if you could only choose one)?

Let’s preface the rest of this post quickly now by saying that there are, of course, major differences in using social networking as a way to keep up to date with your family and friends and using social media as an online marketing tool to promote your business or website.  So, depending on how you’ll actually use social media, one option might be significantly better for you in general personal use, and the other might be best to use for more focused marketing.

But this still doesn’t exactly answer our question—if you had to choose either Facebook or Twitter, which would it be?

The Benefits Of Facebook

• Facebook has a huge user base. By far the most popular social media option around the entire world right now, the chances are pretty good that even grandma uses Facebook.

• This popular social networking platform attracts a huge spectrum of users. Again, these days it’s not at all uncommon for everyone from grade-schoolers all the way up to their great grandparents to have a Facebook account.

• Facebook has lots of media options. Beyond text-only blurbs, using Facebook makes it a breeze to share multimedia like photos and videos.

The Benefits Of Twitter

• Twitter’s user base seems to be more professionally-oriented. This is most likely due to the age group of its users—which happens to be mostly the post-college crowd.

• There are fewer privacy concerns. The Twitter crowd seems to clearly grasp that their “tweets” are intended to be public by default.  It’s a more open public platform because of this.

• Twitter seems to be a social environment that’s open to the little guy. In other words, when implemented with some creativity and ingenuity, even a micro-business owner can attract the same global attention from their tweets as major world-wide corporations can.

There Are A Few Drawbacks To Each Service As Well

With Facebook, there are ever-increasing privacy concerns that have been causing a little bit of a backlash among once-loyal users.  Also, some people find it kind of amateurish when businesses and organizations use Facebook (this is an unfair stereotype that probably derives from the fact that Facebook began as a way to stay in touch with friends).  And at the same time, people who use Facebook strictly as a tool to keep up with family and friends sometimes resent and turn away from any other derived use of the service—including marketing & promotional uses.

The drawbacks to Twitter are kind of similar in some ways, but totally different in others.  First things first, it’s important to realize that Twitter’s base of users isn’t anywhere near that of Facebook.  And those who do use Twitter regularly tend to be a little bit more technically or professionally inclined (which can also be a positive if this is your demographic target).  The other important thing to know about Twitter that could potentially cause issues is the fact that no one is exactly certain as to what direction the social networking service is going to grow—it could be drastically different in just a year or two from now.

So, if you’re going to focus your time and energy on just one social platform, which one will you choose and why?

Fact:  At first glance, design looks easier than it really is.

It’s true.  Think about the last time you saw a picture of something in a magazine—maybe it was a gourmet recipe or something similar.  You might have said, “Hey, that doesn’t look so hard…I can make that!”  And then you did, and well…it didn’t exactly turn out quite as great as you had planned.  Maybe it’s not just a science of following the steps…maybe there is an art to this after all.

Sound all too familiar?  Well, maybe you are a great cook and that’s your forte, so the recipe turned out even better than the magazine picture promised.  And of course, we know that there lots of incredible graphic designers and web designers out there…who naturally create truly awesome designs.  Everyone is good at something, but sometimes it’s best to really be honest with ourselves and admit we might not be the best person for the job if that is indeed the case.

Unfortunately, for those out there who are not designers, then one thing is certain—those good folks are definitely not web designers either.  Best to leave it up to the pros for expert quality results.

It’s no secret that web designers (and for that matter, designers of all kinds) tend to be a little bit finicky.  And when you think about it, it’s hard to blame them really.  After all, they spend countless hours each and every day looking at designs and figuring out what really looks great and works well at the same time.  Just another day in the life of a professional designer…

Advice:  When it comes to designing your website, trust your designer.

You’ve spent a good amount of time and due diligence making sure you are working with just the right web designer to best achieve your unique goals.  Now it’s time to step back and put some confidence in your well-vetted decision.  Trust your web designer’s advice by all means.

• Ethical, professional designers will never borrow, copy, or otherwise steal someone else’s work to use on a site design they’re working on (even if their client asks them to).
• Expert web designers know what works, especially for the niches they specialize in.
• They are well versed on the latest technologies and upcoming web design trends.
• Good web designers work with your goals to ensure your site’s design will achieve its intended results.
• Continuous scope changes or other diversions from an agreed upon path to design completion will inevitably lead to spiraling project expenses—however, pro designers always prefer to avoid this scenario even if they ultimately won’t charge as much.

Web designers want to create the site to perform and function correctly—each new site is their next potential masterpiece.  Their professional reputation is at stake here and the last thing an expert web designer wants to do is violate the principles of good design.

Bottom Line:  Once you’ve selected a designer you trust, it’s best to just sit back and let them work their creative magic!

Do you need a mobile version of your website…or is it overkill?  Good question, and hopefully we can help you with the decision making process a little bit.  But first, a few quick facts:

• The iPhone retains a significant portion of the overall mobile device market share—and it doesn’t display any of the Flash-based components that traditional web browsers display.

• According to AdMob, one of the leading mobile advertising networks, nearly 40 million unique Android and iPhone mobile devices were in use worldwide during the month of April 2010.  And this is just 2 of the major mobile players—it doesn’t even include Blackberry or other popular devices.

• In Q1 2010, shipments of smart phones numbered 54.7 million units; this is a 56% increase over the previous year (see ZDNet article here).

The bottom line is this—more and more people are relying on their mobile devices to access your website.  While there is expansion and growth of the overall web market (in addition to traditional standard web browser use), there is also a trending shift away from traditional computer-based web browsers to mobile devices.

What Does This Mean For My Site?

Well, if you’re utilizing a Flash-based design, chances are, you’re already experiencing some trouble if you don’t have a mobile version of your site.  Your mobile visitors are simply not seeing all of your site (if any at all).  This is something to remedy one way or another as promptly as possible.

If your site is graphically heavy, or utilizes robust multimedia or programming functionality, its performance on mobile devices will be significantly impacted in a negative way.  Remember, not all mobile device users are on the latest high-speed data networks; also, mobile device processing power isn’t exactly as robust as your home or office PC.

Simpler, clean sites without all of the extra gimmicks should do well on most mobile devices without any additional modifications.  It is always important to test and verify this though.  Lightweight, standards-compliant sites will naturally do better on mobile device browsers than other, more resource-heavy websites.

What Does It Take To Go Mobile?

Creating a mobile version of your site is not always as difficult as it sounds.  With a modern, quality CSS-coded site, usually displaying the content in a mobile version of the site can be accomplished by simply creating an alternate stripped-down version of the CSS style—and then using automated code to direct mobile users to this version.  Some CMS sites have ready-to-plug-in mobile templates available to take even more of the hassle out of the process.  Of course, in other more complex cases, it can be quite a bit more challenging to accomplish.

Some site owners are choosing to just give the major areas of their sites a mobile-friendly makeover.  In the end, it’s really up to you to decide.  If at all possible though, it’s probably wise to just bite the bullet and go for it.  Your mobile visitors will definitely appreciate the fact that your site has considered their unique situation and tried to make life better for them!

If there is one thing about investing in a quality website that’s built upon solid web development, it would probably be the fact that once the initial site is done, future improvement and expansion is a breeze.  Let’s start this blog post off with an analogy:

Think about it for a minute—when you buy an older house that needs some modernization, do you tear it down and start over, or do you remodel it and return it to the modern livability it deserves?  Well, most of the time, the scenario follows the path of remodeling—it’s usually less expensive and less time consuming to produce perfect results this way.  Of course, sometimes, the renovations required would be extreme enough that starting over from scratch on a clean slate is the best approach to creating the dream home you have imagined.

The moral of the story?

Well, usually homes designed and built with quality in mind from the beginning are more future proof than those that are simply thrown together for a quick profit.  Both will need facelifts and updating in the future—that much is inevitable.  But the expenses and time required to keep up a well-built home are clearly less than the alternative in almost every case.

The bottom line here is that websites are really no different than homes.  Build them right and continued development is possible.  Yes, facelifts are necessary from time to time to keep things fresh, but the hard work will have been done upfront.  Now back to the original question for a few minutes…

How often should you give your website a new facelift?

The honest answer in short form is probably just a little bit more frequently than you’re comfortable with.  Web technology changes from day to day—most sites can weather these intensely short term changes well when they have been designed with a forward-looking approach to begin with.

But even then, the realty is inevitable.  Sites do need to be updated and modernized from a development and technology standpoint just to keep on functioning well with current software and hardware (and also to remain attractive from an SEO standpoint).

And even more important than the behind the scenes technology outlook is the fact that current graphic design standards change even more rapidly.  Think about your favorite looking mainstream website for a minute…do you remember the last major design facelift it’s had?

Chances are, you’ve just answered, “probably not.”  After all, the mainstream sites change so gradually and so frequently to keep up with the latest trends in design and marketing that it’s difficult to notice abrupt improvements (but try an internet archive search for that same site 3 years ago, and you’ll most definitely find that an extreme facelift has indeed taken place over the years).

Same goes for your favorite magazines and other media—look at a current issue and then pull one from the archives, just a few years in the past.  While the main subjects and topics remain the same, major design and style changes have taken place over the years.

Your website visitors do have an eye for design (even if they don’t realize it).  Seriously, in the design and marketing driven world we all live in today, constant exposure to commercials and advertising—all featuring cutting-edge graphic design—is completely the norm.  We’re programmed to recognize and expect certain design components and trends even if we don’t realize its taking place.  It’s just subliminal.

So in an ideal world, if the time and financing permit, giving a website a new facelift needs to take place frequently, little by little, making gradual improvements and updates.  Every different industry and niche permits growth at a slightly different pace; you’ve got to be in tune with what your competitors are doing to stay sharp.

And even though in the real world, most of us aren’t able to refresh and give our sites facelifts on a day-to-day, or even month-to-month basis (like the top online players are doing), we still need to look at our websites at least once a year to give a them a solid review and determine if it’s time for a good facelift.  If there are any doubts, then the answer is, yes…a facelift is in order.

Remember, your website should be a ROI-building tool.  Keeping it fresh and up to date in the eyes of your visitors is an important investment that simply must be made.

1.    Use titles that capture reader (and searcher) attention.

Your headline is the single most important part of your entire blog post.  It’s what the searchers usually see in the SERPs (search engine results pages) and it’s what piques the interest of a potential reader to pursue the article further.

2.    Write your blog posts in a friendly, conversational tone.

Unless you’re in a very technical, professional, or academic field, it’s always good to keep your web writing as conversational as your topic and audience will allow.  Just talk naturally through your keyboard and let the words flow.  Be sure to grammar check once you’re all done by reading the post out loud—writing for your blog just got a whole lot easier!

3.    Use plenty of whitespace while writing your blog articles.

Whitespace means keeping your paragraphs brief (usually no more than 4 sentences), using sub headlines throughout your blog post, and otherwise ensuring that your copy doesn’t “appear” overwhelming to the eye.  If it just visually looks overwhelming, very few will actually go on the read the copy.

4.    Remember that bullet points and numbered lists make excellent blog copy.

This compliments the above rule about whitespace very nicely—but also stands on its own as a web writing principle.  It’s been proven that blog readers are attracted to quick and easy informative posts about the topics they’re interested in.  Lists and bullet points remain one of the top methods of delivering factual information in a quick and concise reader-friendly format.

5.    Cover a topic of interest with your blog posts.

This means planning and not just rambling about corporate policy or something else that’s really mundane to readers.  If you’re out of ideas, think about frequent questions that your customers ask (and answer them in conversational way through the blog).  That one always works in a bind—sometimes it helps to keep a swipe file list of potential blog post ideas handy so you can add ideas at any time they come to you in the normal course of your daily life.

6.    Consider including a relevant attention-grabbing image at the top of the post.

A picture has always been worth a thousand words…and nothing changes here when it comes to blogging.  Using an attention grabbing image can really make the difference if you’re having trouble drawing readers further into your blog copy.  Be creative and try and come up with stock photos that are colorful and somehow tell a story of their own.

7.    Show right away that you have extensive knowledge of the topic.

One way to do this is to share a few bullet point facts or statistics within the first couple of paragraphs of your post.  Sometimes this alone can make enough of an impact to catch a reader’s attention and keep their interest as they continue to read on.

8.    Know that while longer doesn’t necessarily make a blog post better, it does have more potential than a one paragraph blurb style blog post in the eye of the beholder.

Sometimes shorter is actually better too—but too many really short posts can send a message to the visitor that there might not be anything of value to read on the blog.  Getting this just right can be a challenging balancing act sometimes, but getting it right is worth the challenge.

9.    Integrate the basic principles of SEO in each and every blog post you write.

Think about important keywords that pertain to the topic you’re getting ready to tackle.  Make a list of those keyword phrases and at least try to include them where they fit naturally.  Also, include the single most important keyword phrase in the blog’s title.

10.    Don’t be afraid to use other popular blogs for inspiration.

This doesn’t mean copying them (in fact, by all means, you should definitely never copy them).  Instead, just look at their format and the kind of attention-grabbing headlines they use that make an impression on you.  They don’t even have to be topically related to your blog—the ideas and inspiration are universal.