In my last post, "Write Like You Mean It, I wrote about how important it is to be passionate in your blog writing, if you want to attract and keep readers. I was just reflecting about this, about the blogs that keep me coming back for more. I'd have to say my all-time favorite blogger from a writing perspective is Fake Steve Jobs. Sure, he's not even real. But yet he "keeps it real". Every post is so witty, he just cracks me up. I love his creative use of language, his invented words (e.g. MicroTards, Freetards). The blog provides a little window into Steve Jobs' psyche. Well ok, maybe not, since it's actually being written by a Forbes magazine journo, but still...

Posts of FSJ's like this one are just gold. Luv it!

The best advice I can give anyone who has started - or is thinking about starting - a personal blog is to write about what you love. When you write about what you are passionate about, it will show through in your writing. The entire process of writing will be more enjoyable as well when you are writing about the things you are passionate about; it will not feel like a chore and you will rarely run out of topics.

If you have no passion for what you are writing about, why are you writing at all? Your entries will come across as boring or flat and you will not gain the readership your writing skills deserve. When you write about what you love, it is a lot easier to sound like an expert in your field.

If you are not sure what you are passionate about, take the time to figure it out. You owe it to yourself, and your potential readers, to know and write about what makes you get out of bed in the morning. If your goal is to make money with a blog, write about what you love and the money will follow... You will have more readers and will write better posts. Great content brings traffic/conversions and when you write about something you love it is difficult to write poorly.

With two natural listings in the top 10 on the Google SERPs for “dating” it’s hard to argue with Match.com’s SEO tactics. It works well for them - a flashy front page with a novel of text below the fold. Since this has worked so well for Match.com and has been talked about on several popular blogs it seems that others are following suit and using this same format.

I came across Patagonia.com recently and low and behold I found a near replica of Match.com’s tactic – An image and a simple selection form. Scroll down a little, however, and we find keyword-stuffed gibberish text and lots of it. This is disturbing because it feels lazy. Is this the future marriage of usability and SEO? It works, it is easy to duplicate and one doesn’t even need to write good content to get decent results. The only thing this tactic requires is a bare-bones layout built on a foundation of spam.

My instinct tells me that this tactic will fall out of favor with Google in the near future as the spiders advance and learn how to detect it. Until then, however, I expect this trend to continue to grow as more and more snake-oil SEO’s fall in line with what Match.com has made popular.

Tagging isn't just a tool for usability (even though it's typically mostly thought of in those terms), it's also a powerful weapon for search engine optimization. That's because tagging allows you to rejig your internal hierarchical linking structure, flowing the link juice more strategically throughout your site. And because those links are textual and keyword-rich, a tag cloud is far superior in terms of SEO to the traditional graphical navigation bar.
When tagging is applied to a website, such as a blog, it can significantly increase the site's traffic by achieving visibility for a much larger array of search terms.

The above quote is from my recent Search Engine land article entitled, "Effective Tagging For Both Usability & SEO." I go into a lot of details how strategic tagging can help you. Here is a tip about tag clouds that I'd like to share with you:

Tag Clouds: When you tag your blog or website, the items are then put into an organized, keyword catalog. By taking those tags, you can organize them into a "tag cloud," which shows keyword topic popularity by the size and sometimes color of the font. Tag clouds enable you to force a new navigation styles for your site or blog based on keyword popularity, and also help your website look up-to-date with enhanced, Web 2.0 functionality. (For an example of a tag cloud, you can see one at the end of my blog.)

For other, more specific tagging techniques, I hope you visit my article.

From creating great title tags to crafting specialized, keyword-rich content, there is a lot out there that you can do to implement some great SEO on your website or blog. In this article I wrote for my CNET: Searchlight blog, I cover ten things that should be at the forefront of every SEO's mind. Some topics for discussion include: ensuring each of your websites or blogs are unique, writing compelling meta descriptions, and building a strong, internal linking structure. Be sure to read my post for more details about what you can do to improve or maintain your SEO health.

Whether you post on blogs or run a website, at some point or another you've probably come across anchor text that reads, "click here." Every time you add anchor text with words like "here," "more," or "this," you are sending a message to the search engines that that simple word is what your link is all about. The end result doesn't change much for humans, but it does mean something to the search engines. If you are interested in ranking for particular keywords, you'll want to pay close attention to your anchor text.

My article on CNet, which can be found on my CNet: Searchlight blog, talks about why you should implement keywords in your anchor text links on your site to help boost your rankings.

I'm sure we've all experienced coming across a "404 error page" while surfing on the web. Have you run into one that was pretty unusual? Take a peek at the Homestar 404 Error Page for example, from a website that features a character called "Homestar Runner."

In this article, which you can read on my CNet: Searchlight blog, I talk about how creative 404 error pages can be a good thing for your site, and good potentially go viral. Not only do they show that you have a sense of humor, but they help your customers and visitors get a chuckle, and click away from your site with a smile on their face.

We all know that keywords are important for on-page optimization, but did you know that they can also influence file names, links, and a website's architecture? With that much importance placed on the words used, many SEO gurus believe that keyword research involves hours of endless projects to find targeted keywords and keyword phrases.
In this article on my CNET:Searchlight blog, I talk about how you don't have to block out hours of time to do keyword research, and cover some of the useful "free" tools available on the web.

Gone are the days of seeing news reporters rapidly typing away at a typewriter, dreaming of catchy headlines to attract readers. Instead, reporters are faced with "writing boring headlines" for Google, to get indexed and ultimately get found in the SERPs. This concept of writing for machines causes many reporters to get hysterical, because ultimately they believe that writing for Google means that they have to sacrifice their creativity. In my blog post at CNet, I discuss why journalists should embrace this shift to help their articles rank in the SERPS, and how they can do it without diminishing their writing style.

For more about this topic, read the article on my CNet: Searchlight blog.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Bryan Eisenberg, who is the co-founder and CPO of Future Now, Inc. Bryan is also a high profile speaker, author, consultant, blogger, and the publisher of GrokDotCom. In additional to his role at Future Now, Bryan is also one of the founders and Chairman of the Web Analytics Association.

My interview with Bryan was about personas and "Persuasion Architecture," a process that helps persuade customers to make a decision on your website when traditional marketing methods fail. As an inventor of Persuasion Architecture, Bryan shares a wealth of expertise into the world of crafting personas to get into your customers' minds in order to give them the content they need in order for them to make their next click decision.

There are several nuggets that we can take from Bryan's interview, that revolve around the idea of personalized search. I asked Bryan what the typical rate was for a typical online retailer. His answer? "The average online conversion rate for a typical retailer today is 2.4%." That's pretty depressing when you think about it. So how to you help your conversion rate through managing your content?

Persuasion Architecture is based on Bryan's idea that, "everybody does things for their own reasons." These reasons translate into four, distinct preferences, the how and why people do the things that they do. Once you understand the four basic personality types -- emotional, logical, fast-paced, and disciplined -- you can build perspectives or snapshots that give you insight into how your customers might want to purchase your products. Once you understand the "how," then you can build the "who." Who is buying your products from your site? That's where profiles come into play, small pictures to what Bryan says will "give us a little better understanding of who that grouping or that mode of behavior is going to be -- and then ultimately two personas."

Listen to my interview with Bryan Eisenberg for more about how to boost your site's conversion rate. This podcast is 40 minutes long, and is a 10 MB download. Enjoy!