Buzzmaker

In the last couple of weeks I have launched a new site. It’s called Personal Brand Grader and it delivers advice and tools for improving your personal brand but this is not about what I want to talk today. Instead I will tell you about a tool I have found when working on Personal Brand Grader. It’s called ScribeSEO and it helps optimizing your blog posts for search engines.

When we write a blog post or any piece of internet content we have to take into account a lot of things like the number of words a post should have, the frequency of the keywords present in the article, their prominence or density, what tags you should post for your article and so on. Unfortunately Scribe will not write the post for you. Instead it will give you the statistics for your article, it will give you a grade based on how optimized is your piece of content, it will recommend the tags for your post and it will give you a lot of advice on optimizing your article and changing keywords. I have used this service for the past month and it is just brilliant. It has optimized my posts from the beginning (before posting them) and it has also educated me on what I should consider when writing a headline, description or the body of the article. So in time I managed to get high SEO grades on my articles from the first analysis.

The SEO service is developed to be either a WordPress plugin which is great for those that use WordPress to power their blogs. You just have to press a button and your post gets analyzed and optimized. It has also a web based version. With this last one you can optimize any piece of content, grade it and when you are content with what you got you just have to copy and paste it in your CMS (Content Management System).

The only downside of this service is that you have to pay for it. The price starts from $27 a month for 30 evaluations which is more than enough if you have just a blog. You can choose the publisher option that gives you 120 evaluations for $47 or the advanced option where you have to pay $97 for 300 SEO evaluations.

Now you have started a blog but for different reasons people are not getting to your site. What are the 10 things that will drive traffic to your site?
1.Great Title. Whatever the post is about you should look for catchy titles. Most of the viewers will read your post only if the first thing they read makes them click your post. In most cases we decide what is interesting and what’s not in a matter of seconds (less than 10 seconds) and the only thing we can read in this short time is the title of the post so have a great title and you will increase your chances of having me reading the rest of your post. If you are reading this post means that the title I’ve chosen made you click on it.
2, Great Content. In real estate there is a saying that there are 3 things that are important to make profit and these are: location, location and location. That means that if your property is in a good location then you sure can make money from it.
For your blog if you have good content you will get noticed and your blog will get big numbers of visitors. If you have a good title but the content is not so good you will have traffic but of low quality and with increased bounce rate (the percentage of your visitors that leave your site in less than 10 seconds). What else can you do to drive traffic to your site?
3. Optimize your post for Search Engines. When you write a post be sure to complete all the meta fields such as description, keywords and so on (keywords are not used by Google but the other search engines may use them). Verify if your keywords appear in the body of your post frequently enough and get as many inbound links as possible. These will help the search engines to index your post and to rank better in the search results. You can have plugins that help you optimize your blog. I use All-In-One-SEO plugin for WordPress on this blog.
4. Social bookmarking sites. Submit your post to social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon. One very important thing for getting found is the number and quality of links to your blog and your post from other sites. By submitting your post to social bookmarking sites you can get quickly some links to your post. You can use plugins on you site so that people that liked your post can bookmark your post.
5. Social Media. Promote your post through social media. Write a tweet, update your status in LinkedIn or Facebook. Your followers, friends or connections will be the first to visit your article and comment on it. From my experience, depending on the moment I tweet about more than half of my twitter followers are clicking on the link to my post. If you have huge number of followers this is a great way of driving traffic.
6. Newsletters. This is a classic one, if you have a newsletter you can advertise your post there.
7. Blog comments and Forums. By posting relevant comments on other blogs you benefit of the traffic of the other site and drive traffic to yours. In most of the cases you will not get SEO credit for the links posted in the comments (while the comments may be set not to be followed by search engines) but you may get real visitors. Forums are another grate way of posting links to you article. You can answer to a user question and just ad “by the way, I’ve wrote a post on this topic and here’s the link”.
8. Pitch other bloggers to link to your post. I do this mostly offline when somebody is asking for my support, I give him my advice and then tell: “by the way, I’ve written a post on this subject, If you are interested in more details here is the link”.
9. E-mail signature. You interact daily via e-mail with people. Buy writing a link to your post in your signature will make these people aware of your post. Remember that people that know you, that trust your opinion are more likely to read and comment your post than perfect strangers.
10. Directories. Depending on your post you can submit your article to different sites that let you post news with links to your article. I use the Inbound Marketing site for submitting my stories related with inbound marketing. You can search for similar hubs in your niche.
These are the ways I promote my posts. Do you use the same? Do you have some other? What are your best practices? Share them bellow.