Part 2 of Feedback Friday comes from Anne-Marie Murphy. Anne-Marie and I worked together while I was at ePrize. She works for the Quicken Loans family of companies helping every single website be the best.
Ann-Marie is a web content guru so of course I reached out to her for advice. She sent me an email LOADED with ideas. Here are some of my favorite:
“Subscribe” – I recently read on CopyBlogger – great blog about, well, blogging – that he seriously bumped up his RSS subscriber numbers by labeling the icon as “Free Updates” instead of “RSS Feed” or “Feeds.” Might be something to try. Also, you may want to consider getting a Feedburner Feed. It’s simple to set up and provides some extra info like stats (how many subscribers) and also provides the option to let people sign up to get updates in their email.
Excerpts – You may want to try changing your home page format so only excerpts of posts are displayed. This tends to help when you’re looking at metrics (speaking of, have you set your blog up for a Google Analytics account?), particularly to figure out what posts are drawing the most interest.
Keywords – Also, once you nail down your topic niche, you may want to bookmark this link in your browser:http://tinyurl.com/2fu9n5o. It’s a link to Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool. Before I post anything on the Quizzle Blog, I enter what keywords I think are most relevant to the post into this tool and it will spit out other relevant keywords. Pick a bunch of the mostly highly trafficked keywords and include them in your post tags and as much as possible in the article content. This will help you rank for highly trafficked keywords in search engines (eventually) and attract more readers. Also, this may be a bit overkill, but you may want to even come up with a list of 10-20 target keywords that are most relevant to your topic niche to incorporate into posts whenever you can. The more you use these keywords, the more likely you are to rank for them.
Pictures – Great use of pictures! Including pics really does make a post sing. Pictures and videos can also be great for search; make sure you’re including an “Alt Tag” (should be in your image options) on each pic using keywords that are most relevant to the post.
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