Blogging: Not Just For Teens Anymore	Visited: 1085 5.0/5.0 (1 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Shannon Suetos August 19, 2010

Do you remember LiveJournal? Chances are if you have been blogging for a while you do.  Before WordPress and BlogSpot got big, LiveJournal was the blogging platform de jour.  Now it seems like everyone has a blog, not just tech savvy teens.

A new study on eMarketer is reporting that, “43% of US companies will be blogging by 2012.”  eMarketer’s senior analyst Paul Verna goes on to say, “studies have shown that marketers perceive blogs to have the highest value of any social media in driving site traffic, brand awareness, lead generation and sales—as well as improving customer service.”

Before posting you should run through a quick check list of items to make sure your post is up to par for public viewing.  Having a well optimized post, as well as great content will ensure maximum exposure for your business blog.

Short and Sweet
More times than not people are going to skim your post.  We live in a world where multi-tasking is a must and we need information quick, fast and in a hurry. Posts that run 200-400 words usually suffice.  Taking out all of the “fluff” will make your readers happy. 

On that same note adding bullet points and bolded headers (like the one above) help the reader skim and read the sections that are going to be the most beneficial to them.  Bolding the main points in your post can give just as good of information as the content below them.

Keywords, Meta Description and Title Tags
Making sure all of these fields are filled out will make the search engines happy.  Figure out what keywords will be most beneficial to your blog and use them.  Don’t overwhelm your posts with the keywords, but make them flow naturally and sprinkle them in your post.

Linking
Search engines love links, especially when they are going to relevant content.  Having quality links in your posts can help tremendously.  In that same regard you want relevant sites to link back to your blog—making your content priority number one.  The best tip anyone can give on SEO is to have great content.  People link back to you because they liked the content, so make it good.

These are just a few great tactics to implement into your blog.  Keeping up to date on SEO tactics and honing your writing skills will be a must.  Let us know in the comments below what you find useful.