Posts Tagged ‘Business Blog Marketing’

5 Tips To Speed Up WordPress for Business Blog Marketing

Friday, August 6th, 2010

WordPress is a very user-friendly site, which is why it is popular among those who are blogging for fun, and those who use blogs for business blog marketing. However, too much traffic to your website can slow it down, and if you’re not prepared, and influx of traffic can crash your site. Here are some suggested  tips and tricks from Mashable, to make sure you can handle a high number of viewers.

1. Utilize WordPress Object Cache or a Caching Plug-In – There are several ways to cache database queries, preventing new server requests on each load, which lessens the strain on the server. There are several plug-ins you can download, like WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache. Or, you can enter the following code into your wp-config.php file:

// Enable the WordPress Object Cache:
define(ENABLE_CACHE, true);
Read more on this topic:

2. Choose the Right Web Hosting Service – Some web hosts are optimized to run Wordpress, and some are not. Here is a list of what you should look for when choosing a host:

PHP 4.3 or greater
MySQL 4.1.2 or greater
suPHP for security
Apache or Nginx

3. Be Selective About Plug-ins – Remove any inactive plug-ins, and any active plug-ins that you are no longer using. Also, make sure you are running the most current release of Wordpress, and all your plug-ins.

4. Choose a Simple Theme – With a myriad of themes to choose from, and the ability to customize your theme, it might be temping to go all out. However, themes with images, tables, or frames can slow down your site’s loading time. Want to know if your page is too slow? You can test it on YSlow or Pingdom’s Page Test.

5. Compress Images – People like pictures, so don’t omit them just to speed up your site. If images are formatted and compressed correctly. For black and white images, or images with only a few colors, it should be saved as a .GIF or .PNG. Images in full color should be saved as a .JPG. If you edit an image in Photoshop, use the “save for the web” option. When sizing an image, smaller is better.

These are a few of the easier ways to speed up your site. Next week we’ll get into more advanced techniques, so you can soon be on your way to a faster Wordpress site, ideal for great business blog marketing.

Business Blog Marketing 101: Recognizing Spam Comments

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

Not All Blog Comments are Created Equal – Know What to Post or Just Delete

Moderate and monitor all comments on your business blog.

Spam, the dreaded online term for anything that keeps coming back to annoy you and forces itself into your blog comment queue. Comments from far east websites as well as tactics from black hat SEO firms will likely degrade your business’s  reputation as well as other ethical blog marketing efforts.

How can a corporate or business blog avoid these infectious comments? Follow this rudimentary business blog marketing advice.

1. Always, always check the “moderate comments” box on your blog platform. If you do this, then you can decide what comments are worthy enough to approve on your business blog.

Recognize what constitutes Spam and what may be legitimate. Here are a few examples I recently found on this SEO business blog:

Submitted on 2010/07/27 at 10:54am

Good brief and this post helped me alot in my college assignement. Say thank you you seeking your information. (from what could be a non-spam website)

Submitted on 2010/07/28 at 7:56am

thanks for keeping me up to date on this issue.

2. If a comment is questionable, then follow the link provided. More often than not, the website will no longer exist or it will be another blog with a list of links and no content. These links are NOT the type of link building you want for your business blog, which may impede any other marketing efforts.

Look at this example below:

oldfortharrod.com
Usually I do not post on blogs, but I would like to say that this article really forced me to do so! Thanks, really nice article.

The site above is legitimate, but the comment is not. Our SEO blog receives many comments like this and I think someone is just adding a random domain or it’s the work of an unethical SEO firm.

3. Monitor & delete your business blog comment queue often. If your business is maintaining a blog everyday or every week, and it’s receiving traffic, then someone should be monitoring the spam and other comments too. If it’s not your marketing department, then appoint someone else to do it.

Afterall, you don’t want to waste your time sifting through 65 spam comments every month, do you?

Search Circus monitors all comments on our SEO business blog and we offer ethical business blog marketing advice via articles, consulting, and adult education classes in the greater Cleveland area. Ask us how we can help your business garner a greater presence online.

Could a Blog for Business Be Part of Your Website Promotion?

Monday, May 17th, 2010

For business owners, it’s very important to not only have a great Website, but to also promote that site with social bookmarks, by adding links, interacting on social media networks and most importantly, blogging. Nowadays, many people follow multiple blogs and own blogs themselves, and what many people don’t know is that blogging is a great business Website promotion tool, and here’s why.

Blogs are a way to reach out to your customers and talk to them in a more conversational tone. A business Website should be professional and easy to navigate with a large amount of information about the product or service you are trying to sell. A blog however, is meant to have an informal tone, and can give information related to your product or service, but not always mentioning it directly. In other words, keep the advertise-y words out of your blog. Instead, talk about industry news, or other product or service-related topics, and link keywords to your Web site. This will urge people to visit your site and check out your product. When you provide useful information that relates back to your product or service, potential customers will read your blog for the information, but also introduce themselves to your product and become more familiar with your company.

A blog for business Website promotion purposes also improves your credibility online. Although the Internet can be a wonderful place to shop, many people are weary of purchasing things online because there are so many dishonest retailers on the Web. If a potential customer is unfamiliar with your business, they’re more apt to shy away from taking a chance with you. However, if you have a blog, they can get to know your company on a more personal level, see that your goal is to provide useful information and therefore will trust you more. This will in turn make them more likely to purchase your product or service.

A blog will also help improve your rankings in the search engines which help give your company more exposure. Linking to your Website in every blog post will help boost your search engine page rank because more links always equal higher position. The links will also encourage search engines to crawl your Website pages more often which also ups your page rank. Also your Website will gain more page views because your blog will help drive traffic to your Website and you will look more relevant to the search engines. When you appear higher in the search engine rankings, potential customers will see you first instead of your competitors, which will make them more likely to buy from you because not only will they see you first but they’ll also recognize that if you appeared first, you must be a more credible and popular business than your competitors.

When you have a blog strictly for business Website promotion, it’s important to make sure the blog is updated at least once a week with fresh information or news that’s related to your product or service. If the content is not relevant or interesting there will be no reason for readers to keep coming back, which is the goal of a blog. Creating and maintaining a blog is a great, inexpensive way to promote your product or service, so what are you waiting for? Jump headfirst into the blogosphere, you won’t regret it.