Whether you work in advertising, PR, interactive, social, direct or simply general marketing, you must write.

Our new book Marketing in the Round discusses each of these tactics in depth, and how to weave them together. But no matter the integration strategy, marketing a good product or service successfully depends on your ability to write well.

Think about it. Even a video requires a script. Images tell a story, often with captions or short phrases embodied in info graphics. Consider how Hugh McLeod uses captions with his comics to communicate. There’s still a message — words — that he conveys.

Whether it’s a short form like mobile messaging or great ad headlines (“Imported from Detroit”) or long form communications such as speeches and white papers, great marketers write fantastic copy!

Valuing Writing

Those who want great careers can best ensure continued opportunities by honing their writing skills. Without the fundamentals, there’s little hope of mastering one of the core subsets of marketing — PR, advertising, direct or interactive.

Yes, you can become a great creative. Yes, you can become a master SEO practitioner. Yet it’s like being a basketball player who can pass and rebound, but can’t score.

Sooner or later, if you want to advance in marketing, you must write.

Marketing values great writing, whether it’s stated or not. Even a great strategy must be well communicated to your colleagues.

It’s no coincidence both of us studied English in college. We wish more Communications and Business programs at the university level put a stronger focus on the primary fundamentals of grammar and storytelling. The entire marketing profession would be better for it.

Styles Beyond Social

So much of today’s marketing conversation revolves around personality and social media engagement. We don’t disagree that these storytelling methods are important.

But we do see them as a method. Style takes many forms. Without understanding how words empower you to choose one style or another for different media, marketers will struggle to master more than one discipline.

One thing we both benefited from was learning to write for different media! How can you challenge yourself to learn a new writing form?

Writing a research report requires a sophisticated arc and the incorporation of data-intense proof points, while still telling stories to compel readers. Compare that to a 50-word print advertisement. Both forms tell stories through different uses of the written word and illustrations despite disparate length.

Comprehending how the written word is used across different media and marketing tactics empowers a marketer to supersede media. Such is the power of words.

Geoff Livingston is an author and marketing strategist, and serves as VP, Strategic Partnerships for Razoo. A former journalist, Livingston continues to write, and most recently he co-authored Marketing in the Round, and authored the social media primer Welcome to the Fifth Estate.

Gini Dietrich is the founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich, a Chicago-based integrated marketing communication firm. She also is the founder of the professional development site for PR and marketing pros, Spin Sucks Pro and co-author of Marketing in the Round.

Their new book Marketing in the Round shows you how to get more value from all your marketing and communications channels integrated together!

Image via Geoff Livingston/Creative Commons

Writing, the Marketing Cornerstone is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency

The ‘highlight’ feature is geared toward individual Facebook users, not pages or businesses, and is now being tested by a small number of people in New Zealand. Currently, the visibility of Facebook posts is determined by the site’s EdgeRank algorithm that takes into account factors like affinity, weight and time to determine who sees that particular post—which, by the way, is typically seen by only 12 percent of your friends.

When new sites or features are released, we tend to sit back and see how things play out before making a decision. And although we’re interested to see if the ‘highlight’ feature becomes more widespread, our gut feeling is that this is not a direction in which Facebook should go. In fact, unless there’s something I’m totally missing, this downright stinks.

Sure, Facebook wants to make money—we all do, right? But are they really hurting for revenue? There’s such a huge risk involved in creating a social site in which visibility can be bought rather than earned by producing relevant, quality content that sparks organic engagement. Creating ways to game the system—as with Klout or Empire Avenue, for example, or Facebook’s new ‘highlight’—seem, to us anyway, an utter contradiction of the inherent purpose and benefit of social sites.

Not only could this tactic get annoying—it could become downright spammy, too. Can’t you already kind of make a list of the people you know that you can see starting to do this? I know I can. If this is going to happen universally, to our way of thinking the value of the News Feed will be diminished, because it will be populated by the annoying folks who are paying for visibility.

Hopefully Facebook will be smart and limit the use of paid highlights—to something like once a month. That way, if Facebook advertising doesn’t make sense as a possible outreach solution, users could have the option to more widely promote information that they find truly important without abusing the feature at a low price and making everyone who knows them hate them.

What’s your take on Facebook’s latest move?

Image by billaday via Creative Commons

Facebook’s Popularity Contest: Buying Visibility is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency

The penalty is part of Google’s larger ongoing effort to reward high-quality sites, especially those that regularly produce relevant and informative content, which Google lumps under the term “white hat” SEO. Google’s nemesis is “black hat webspam,” in which SEO techniques like keyword stuffing and link schemes are used to rank pages higher than they should be.

As part of the over-optimization penalty, sites that engage in “black hat” tactics will receive decreased rankings—and who wants to get on Google’s bad side?

If you’re using solid SEO principles, regularly creating great content and avoiding spammy SEO tactics, you’re likely in the clear. Still, it doesn’t hurt to check over your site and incorporate these 6 SEO-related changes to keep your website visible and in Google’s good graces.

1. Real titles. It can be tempting to include several keywords in your site’s title, but don’t do it! This is the place to showcase your brand name and, if applicable, your location, too. In fact, it’s likely that your brand name already includes keywords, whether it’s Digital Marketing or Web Design or Copywriting, to name a few.
2. Too many internal links. Building internal links is just as important as building outbound links, but don’t go overboard by linking to the same internal pages over and over using slightly modified anchor text. Instead, link to internal pages that are useful and relevant. If you really need to link to the same page again, make sure you’ve modified the anchor text (and that it sounds natural, too, instead of a blatant string of keywords).
3. Give footers the boot. Your site’s footers aren’t meant to house a ton of links. Instead, use your footer as it makes sense for your site. And if you have links you want to include, put them in your site’s menu or in another visible place so that they not only help drive traffic to your site, but they actually help visitors, too.
4. Ditch the filler. Watch out for text blocks that are only created for search engines. You’ve probably seen them—they’re typically included toward the bottom of a page that includes great, relevant, readable content—and then, bam! You see a paragraph that’s been blatantly keyword-stuffed. If you’ve got these on your site, delete them! Or better yet, rewrite the content so that you can still get a keyword boost without giving a clear signal to search engines that you’re trying to manipulate them.
5. Steer clear of penalty-likely sources. If your site includes backlinks from penalty-likely sources like link networks, reciprocal lists and article marketing lists, do what you can to ditch your connection to these sorts of links. Link-building is a vital part of SEO, but when you build your links with disreputable sites and services, you might as well not have links at all. And when you think about it, you work hard to create great content for your site—so why should you waste that effort with spammy link sources? Instead, concentrate on sharing your content through your social channels so that you encourage readership and external linking. Comment regularly on blogs and use those comments as opportunities to include a link back to a specific post on your site that relates to the subject matter. Sure, it takes some work to build links, but surely that’s a more appealing alternative than to have your site completely buried by Google as a result of penalties.
6. Too many pages. If your site includes a large number of pages that are targeting only slightly modified variations of keywords, clean it up! Instead, create one well-written page that targets a number of keywords—you’ll still get great visibility in search results without running the risk of penalties. Plus, you’ll keep your readers happy, too. People are smart—and if they come to your site and see a bunch of keyword-laden content that’s hard to understand and not helpful, they’ll hightail it out of there—and that’s the last thing you want.

There’s no denying that SEO is an art and a science—and because it’s a difficult technique to master, there’s a chance that you’ve outsourced your SEO work. If you’ve taken that route, be sure that you keep an eye on your site and your content to make sure nothing wonky is happening. If so, ditch your SEO firm ASAP and get someone who knows what they’re doing.

Are you glad that Google is continuing to take a stronger stance against SEO manipulators? And have you made any changes to your sites as a result?

Image by kenteegardin via Creative Commons

6 SEO Changes To Make Now is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency

Eduardo Conrado, senior vice president and Chief Marketing Officer for Motorola Solutions, has seen this sort of marketing transformation firsthand. During yesterday’s BMA-KC luncheon, Eduardo talked about the division of Motorola into two companies, one of which is Motorola Solutions. As a result of the split, Conrado helped guide Motorola Solutions through a rebranding campaign that not only changed the external vision and image of the company, but also focused internally in order to educate and engage employees.

The Importance of Purpose

As the Motorola Solutions team began to craft the rebranding and marketing strategy, a primary question emerged: What do we do with the brand? The company already had an external consumer image, and the team didn’t want to lose the company’s heritage at the expense of the redefinition.

Marketers are likely familiar with the four “P’s,” but Eduardo said a fifth “P” emerged during the rebranding process: purpose.

When a business becomes purpose-driven, it not only guides a new marketing strategy—it’s also an effective way to translate the company and employee values into leadership. Storytelling is an important part of effectively communicating a company’s purpose, and that storytelling not only helps customers and clients more closely connect with a brand—it also inspires employees, too.

“Creating a purpose-driven brand has a huge impact externally and internally,” Eduardo says.

That’s an important distinction to understand. Much of today’s marketing discussion is centered on the digital space. And although that’s an undeniably important component of today’s marketing landscape, there are other factors to consider, too—namely engaging with customers and employees. So many brands have tunnel vision and solely maintain an external focus. But employees are important, too. The more they’re engaged with and invested in the brand, the more likely they are to serve as brand ambassadors, fulfilling critical customer service roles and sharing their own experiences that can be woven into the larger brand story.

If you’re skeptical, let’s talk money. Eduardo shared a chart that showed Motorola Solutions’ stock significantly increased in value as a result of this purpose-driven rebranding campaign. Research shows that purpose-driven companies tend to outperform competitors, not only as a result of the message but also because these new marketing strategies unite various departments like marketing and sales, creating a stronger presence that can more effectively reach current and prospective customers through relevant content, updated sales initiatives and other strategies.

The New “P’s”

Focusing on purpose is important when redefining your brand’s marketing strategy, but it’s also a good idea to take into account how the four “P’s” of marketing have shifted:

Product –> Solution

Promotion –> Education

Price –> Value

Place –> Access

Today’s marketing strategies are about more than delivering a message. They’re about promoting, educating, informing, sharing and engaging. By creating and sharing your brand’s story, you’re more likely to build a relationship with customers (and employees), a more valuable outcome that can lead to a far bigger ROI than a single, one-off transaction. And what business owner doesn’t want to sell more products and make more money?

If you’re at a point at which you’re starting to take a long, hard look at your brand’s marketing strategy and where you’re headed, you should consider how to shift your business to a purpose-driven entity. Purpose motivates employees and provides a platform in a way that products can’t. And by channeling that focus and motivation, you can better serve your customers and demonstrate that you’re actively invested in not only fulfilling their needs, but also in fostering brand loyalty and a lasting relationship.

What’s your take on Motorola Solutions’ rebranding campaign? Would you consider incorporating purpose into your own company’s vision and marketing practices?

Image by David A. Riggs via Creative Commons

Marketing Strategy: Channeling The Power Of Purpose is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency

I’m guessing that there are readers of this blog who see themselves in what I just described. No matter where you are in the spectrum – whether already having a community to starting from scratch and everything in between – I’ve got some ideas for you that will help you fire up fierce loyalty. Ready?

The Top 7 Ways to Ignite Fierce Loyalty

Determine your reason(s) for wanting a community. If it’s simply a means to an end so that you have people to sell stuff to, hit the pause button. No matter how you try to mask that, potential community members will smell your motivation a million miles away. If your motivation is building relationships with your customers and clients and getting to know them so that you better understand their needs, then you’re on the right track.

Decide who your community is for. So often I see emails, newsletters and websites that try to appeal to a very broad group. And I talk to business owners who are building one community for about five different audiences with five different interests. Because the message is so general, people aren’t sure whether or not they belong. And if they aren’t sure, they won’t stay. Be specific and targeted.

Figure out the single common interest that everyone in your community shares. Maybe there are five different types of people in your community but they share a single common interest. For example: you sell organic dog food and your community is made up of pet owners, veterinarians, pet trainers, pet sitters, and pet store owners. Their common interest is holistic pet wellness. Build your community and fierce loyalty by speaking to that common interest.

Create multiple connection points. And by connection points, I mean opportunities for two-way communication. Gone are the days of businesses pumping out one-way messages. Use blogs, social media, livestream videos and in-person gatherings to connect with your community members and give them the opportunity to connect with each other.

Invite them to help you create the community. Give them an ownership stake by incorporating their ideas into the community design. Ask them what would make the community better and then implement some of their suggestions. It’s a little scary to give up some control, but the payoff is a community full of people who feel that it belongs to them—and that feeling of ownership can be a powerful motivator when it comes to keeping people involved and interested.

Make your community members the stars of the show. Feature content they create. Put their pictures and their words up on your blog or your website. Talk about them by name on your social media channels. Give them a reason to brag to their friends with a link to your site.

Be human. Let your community see all sides of you rather than just your polished, well-groomed public persona. Talk about things that are happening that have nothing to do with business. Share details about your life (only as much as you feel comfortable) so your community members 1) get to know more about who you are and 2) will feel comfortable doing the same.

These seven strategies: determine your reason, decide who it’s for, figure out the common interest, create multiple connection points, invite them to help, make them the stars and be human are not expensive or fancy. And anyone at any point in their community building process can put them into play.

Which one or ones will you try first? What would you add to the list? Let’s talk about it in the comments!

P.S. If you want dig in further on the whole idea of Fierce Loyalty, you can download my whitepaper (opt-in free) “The ROI of a Fiercely Loyal Community.”

Sarah Robinson is president and CEO of Sarah Robinson Co. She is a seasoned business coach, strategist, advisor and speaker who helps business owners set their companies apart from the pack. Based in Birmingham, Ala., Sarah advises her international clients on how to build a thriving, successful community, how to increase social media effectiveness, and how to develop a remarkable online and offline business presence. Her expertise in personal and business change was developed through many years of working with and providing coaching to entrepreneurs, small businesses and start-up non-profits, where she honed her ability to “turn around” thousands of struggling individuals and organizations.

Image by charles chan* via Creative Commons

7 Ways to Ignite Fierce Loyalty in Your Community is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency

And even though we can universally agree on a dislike of spam, here’s the tricky thing—sometimes people spam others without realizing what they’re doing. Since the Can-Spam Act of 2003, spam is a serious business. If you break the rules (yes, there are rules), you could be fined—up to a whopping $16,000 per infraction.

“So what?” you might be thinking to yourself. “People do spammy stuff all the time and nothing ever happens to them.” Although it’s true that a large number of people or companies that make regular use of spammy tactics may never see any sort of enforcement or punishment, not everyone will escape unscathed—and that’s why it’s better to be safe than sorry. Consider Jumpstart Technologies, which was fined $900,000 for “disguising its commercial emails as personal messages and by misleading consumers as to the terms and conditions of the promotion.”

Or ValueClick, which paid $2.9 million to settle an FTC charge that their “emails were deceptive and violated federal law” after ValueClick sent out emails offering “free” gifts that weren’t actually free.

Now that I have your attention, I’ll help you steer clear of violating this act (and spamming your friends and neighbors!). Here are a few of the most common ways you may unknowingly be spamming someone and what to do about it.

Business cards don’t equal subscribers. Just because you received someone’s business card at a networking event doesn’t mean you can automatically sign that person up for your newsletter. In the Can-Spam Act, Congress includes “affirmative consent,” which is defined as ‘the recipient expressly consented to receive the message, either in response to a clear and conspicuous request for such consent or at the recipient’s own initiative’. Unless you discussed your newsletter at the networking event and that person requested to receive your newsletter, it’s a no-go.

Opt out. If you distribute an email newsletter and don’t have a method for unsubscribing, change that—immediately. This is one of the major reasons I suggest that clients use email marketing software such as MailChimp, Constant Contact or iContact (to name a few). These programs all include an unsubscribe link that allows recipients to easily unsubscribe. Plus, the software removes them for you—how easy is that?

Meet the deadline. According to the Can-Spam Act, you have three days to drop someone from your mailing list once they’ve unsubscribed. Again, this is another reason to consider using email marketing software.

Money can’t buy subscribers. You bought a list so everything must be good and right in the world, right? Wrong! The Can-Spam Act says you cannot “harvest” a list. You’ll find that most reputable email marketing software companies will not let you use a purchased list since the individuals on it have not given “affirmative consent” to be a part of “your” list (see tip number 1).

Clear contact info. Your newsletter must include accurate reply to/from and contact information. That means the information needs to readily and easily identify the person and business that sent the message.

Social networks aren’t exempt. You may think the Can-Spam Act doesn’t apply to social media. Think again! On March 28, 2011, in Facebook, Inc. v. MaxBounty, Inc., the California District Court held that messages sent by Facebook users are “electronic mail messages.” If you’re sending blatant ads on social media platforms, think twice before hitting “send!”

To keep yourself and your business in the free and clear (and avoid debilitating fines), make sure you’re following these email marketing best practices:

• Test your emails to be compliant with most email readers, including Outlook, Entourage, Mail, Yahoo, Gmail, etc.
• HTML emails should be no more than 500 to 600 pixels wide.
• If you create an HTML email, you should create an alternative text email (email software programs help you do this).
• Don’t use deceptive subject lines.
• Link back to your website, your Facebook page, your Twitter account and other relevant social networks.
• Include a call to action. After all, you still want your email marketing efforts to generate leads as part of your larger marketing strategy. Just make sure you’re not spamming your audience.

Now that you’ve completed a crash course in avoiding spam, go forth and email wisely!

Robin Moss is the founder of ribit, a digital marketing agency that specializes in custom WordPress web sites, e-commerce sites, SEO, social media, graphic design, marketing, advertising and public relations. In her spare time you will find her on Twitter or trying to find the best sushi restaurant in town.

Lead image by jacobms via Creative Commons

Are You Spamming People And Don’t Even Know It? is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency

The critical thing to understand about mobile is that it’s much, much more than creating a mobile version of your site or developing an app—although those are two important components of a mobile presence.

Wondering where to start planning and defining your mobile strategy?

5 Questions to Shape Your Mobile Marketing Strategy

Has mobile traffic to your website changed?

It’s no secret that we’re analytics nuts – and if you’re not reading your analytics weekly, start. Look at how your mobile traffic is changing – we’ll bet it’s increasing on a regular basis. If our predictions are true, what are you doing to serve up content to those folks accessing your site from mobile devices? If the answer is “nothing” …. well, you know where I’m going with that.

Where are your mobile visitors coming from?

Again, this is where your analytics will come in handy. Google Analytics, for example, will allow you to segment your mobile traffic to see where it’s coming from. Are they coming to your site from Google or from another source? And what page are they landing on that’s drawing them in? Identifying visitor traffic patterns and tracking conversions can help ensure the overall effectiveness of your site.

What are your mobile visitors looking for?

Your analytics show you what your visitors are thinking – if only you’ll let them. Pay attention to what keywords draw them to your site and how that compares to search habits of desktop users. Be sure to develop your content strategies accordingly. Give mobile users information that’s critical to them on a mobile site. That will, most definitely, lead to not only more sales, but also happier customers.

App or mobile website?

Do you really need an app? Probably not. Many times people think they need an app when in reality they need a mobile website. Mobile websites work just like apps and are almost always less expensive to develop. We think mobile websites are so important that when we develop sites for clients, we almost always develop a mobile website concurrently. Apps are ubiquitous, but don’t talk yourself, or let anyone else talk you into an app without first making sure that’s the best possible solution.

How are you going to market your app?

Decide on an app after all? Terrific. What is it about your app that makes it irresistible? The average iOS user has some 60 apps on their device (many have more) yet 26 percent of those apps are downloaded once and never used again. If you decide on an app, you’d best decide how you’re going to market the app once it’s developed, and you’d better be asking some hard questions about what it is about your app that makes it something people want – and need – to come back to day after day. If you don’t ask these questions at the beginning of the app development process, you might be sad once you’ve spent a whole bunch of money and no one is downloading, or more importantly, using, your app. It happens. All the time.

Planning a mobile strategy isn’t all that different from creating an overall digital strategy, or hashing out your approach to social media. And a mobile strategy doesn’t mean creating a mini version of your corporate website and/or developing an app and calling it good.

Taking the time to understand your mobile audience and their needs, and how you can serve those needs in the most effective, efficient manner possible – well, it just leads to good things.

Have you created a mobile strategy for your brand or business? If so, would you recommend any other questions to ask before getting started?

Image by Robert Scoble via Creative Commons

Mobile Marketing: 5 Questions That Will Shape Your Strategy is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency

However, data can be tricky. Not only is there a ton of it, but it’s not always clear what data is the most important. Marketers often get caught up in things like new vs. returning visitors, growth of unique visitors, etc. And while that data is interesting, it doesn’t provide what marketers need: a complete picture of their performance. That’s because that data is web analytics, not marketing analytics.

Not All Analytics Are Made Equal

Google Analytics has, in a way, monopolized the thinking around analytics. When most marketers think about analytics, they think Google. Google does provide powerful analytics, and they’re important, but they aren’t the only data marketers should be looking at and analyzing. Instead, marketers should be focused on the intersection of what’s happening across marketing channels and the outcome of those happenings.

Connecting Multiple Channels

Marketers often struggle with seeing their marketing operation as a whole, particularly when they have campaigns and activities going on across multiple channels (e.g. social, email, web, direct, etc.). Marketing analytics systems do a great job of connecting those channels, allowing the marketer to see the direct relationship between the channels and better understand how that relationship is affecting the larger strategy.

Focusing on the Customer

One of the main differentiators of marketing analytics and web analytics is that marketing analytics focus completely on the prospect, from the time of the first interaction up to their most recent conversation with your company. Meghan Anderson from Hubspot puts it succinctly: “In short, marketing analytics measures people, not page views.” And the more you can learn about the people who are visiting your site and interacting with your content, the more effective you can make your overall strategy based on the insights you’ve gleaned from your marketing analytics.

Hand-in-Hand with Sales

More and more, marketing and sales are focusing on aligning their efforts. Marketing analytics can help marketers find out if their efforts are in line with sales’ priorities, and if their activities are contributing to the bottom line. This is done most effectively when integrating marketing analytics with your existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, like Salesforce.com or Oracle CRM.

As you can see, analytics is an integral part of marketing. With it, you can not only get a clear picture of marketing’s performance, but you can also see how marketing is impacting the bottom line.

Lauren Carlson joined Software Advice in 2010. She writes about various topics related to CRM software, with particular interest in sales force automation, marketing automation and customer service. She has a background in the music industry, and when she isn’t writing about software, you can find her running at Town Lake and singing at local venues. She is a graduate of the University of Texas with a bachelor’s degree in journalism.

Image by Stéfan via Creative Commons

Marketing Analytics: Focus On The Data To Answer Questions is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency

So let’s take a look at what the LinkedIn app has to offer—and why it might just be a must-have for any iPad user partial to the largest business social networking site.

An Overview of LinkedIn’s iPad App

When you open the app, the first thing you’ll notice is the simplistic design. In the main menu, you have three options: Updates, You and Inbox.

As you nose around in the features, however, and you’ll be treated to a rich yet easy-to-navigate experience. Take the Updates section, for example. It resembles a Flipboard-like dashboard that gives you an overview of local weather, your calendar (imported from your iPad calendar with your permission), stock reports, who’s viewed your profile, connection updates and new content, as seen below.

From there, you can scroll through several pages of information that includes a mix of relevant headlines, status updates and group discussion digests. Tap a headline to read the full article. Or tap a connection’s name to be taken to that person’s profile where you can send a message, scroll through connections and find other pertinent information. You can also email someone’s profile to yourself, a helpful feature if you’re researching a prospective job candidate or client.

The LinkedIn app also includes access to your inbox. You can see a quick snapshot of your inbox and can respond to messages and connection requests and delete messages.

Finally, the app gives you access to your profile, as pictured above. The only negative we see is that you don’t have the ability to make any changes to your profile. The only action you can take is to post an update, and it would be nice to see future iterations that allow you to make changes to your profile and its various sections directly from the app.

Overall, the LinkedIn iPad app offers an aesthetically pleasing and robust experience. It’s been a long wait, but when the result is a product that works so seamlessly with the mobile interface, we quickly forget our impatience. The thing that makes this app even cooler? It’s 95 percent mobile web (using HTML5-based mobile web technology) and only 5 percent native. Pretty impressive for such an eye-catching design, right?

Will all this talk of iPad apps, don’t fret, Android users—you’ll see a similarly intuitive layout that’s quite similar to LinkedIn’s iPhone app, and the Android app has recently been updated to include the calendar function.

Have you given LinkedIn’s iPad app a test drive? What do you think so far?

Lead image via Digital Trends

LinkedIn’s iPad App: Proof They Get Mobile is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency

Yet you don’t have to become an SEO professional to make your blog and content more visible in search engine results. By taking a few extra minutes to incorporate some basic SEO tips, you’d be surprised at how much you can improve your blog’s visibility.

5 Ways to Improve Your Blog’s SEO

Keywords in captions

Optimizing your images and captions is an often overlooked strategy, but one that’s just as powerful as optimizing your written content. Hopefully you’re already in the habit of adding alt text to your images that includes relevant keywords. Now take that one step further by adding those keywords to your image captions, too. Not only will optimized captions boost your search visibility, but they can also help entice blog visitors to read further into your post.

Tag your titles

You probably use sub-head titles to break up your blog posts and make the content easier to read. Make sure that you use your blog’s H1, H2, H3 or H4 tags to highlight that information, which tells Google that it’s important. Your blog likely formats each tag differently, so pick the one that works best for your particular site. Note—we generally use the H4 tag in our V3 posts, like with the subhead that you see above.

Install a Google XML sitemap

An XML sitemap is, in essence, a list of pages on your website. And it’s a great way to make sure that Google knows about pages and content on your site that may not have been found by Google’s normal crawling process. The best news? If you have a WordPress blog, there’s a handy plugin you can install that will automatically create a Google XML sitemap for your site. Thanks to Kimberly Gauthier with Shareholic for the heads-up!

Research keywords

As you’re writing your post, sub-heads, headline, captions, alt text, meta description and meta tags, you’ll want to include keywords in each. Take a few minutes before you write to do keyword research using a free tool like Google Keyword. Kimberly mentioned in her post that she does keyword research once the post is written, and makes adjustments as needed. You could go that same route, or do the research before you write so you’ll know what keywords to use. This is where the true art of SEO starts to emerge—you want to include keywords throughout your post, but not in a way that makes the post hard to read or spammy.

Build links with comments

Building links to and from your content is also a critical part of SEO. And one of the easiest ways to create links to your blog from a wide number of sources is to comment on other blogs. It can be hard to make time to do this if you’re juggling a busy schedule, but it’s an important—and often overlooked—step. Most comment forms allow you to include a URL that will appear with your comment. You may want to consider linking back to a specific post that aligns with the subject matter you’re commenting on, rather than your site’s homepage. Aside from building more links back to your blog, commenting can be a great way to form relationships with other bloggers and might even lead to guest blogger opportunities. Here at V3, for example, we’ve often approached commenters to ask them to expand on their thoughts in a guest post—and we know other blogs do the same.

See? SEO isn’t so scary, right? Incorporating SEO tricks like these can go a long way in boosting your blog’s visibility and expanding your content’s reach across the web. And because the aforementioned practices are all basic, sound SEO principles, using tips like these can help maintain your site’s visibility regardless of frequent Google algorithm changes.

Do you incorporate these tips each time you write a blog post? Or did you learn something new?

Image via Google

How to Improve Your Blog’s SEO is a post from: V3 Kansas City Integrated Marketing and Social Media Agency