But if you’re not using the right plugins, you’re not getting the most from your blog. So here’s The FirstFound Blog’s three favourite plugins:

Google Analytics for WordPress: Does exactly what it says on the tin. Adds Analytics tracking code to your site, so that you can monitor traffic to your blog, learn who’s visiting you, and find out which of your posts are most popular.

Sociable: Helps you harness Social Media to promote your posts. Sociable is fully customisable, so you can target as many or as few sites as you like. Although Twitter, Digg, Facebook and Mixx are a must!

HeadSpace2: If you want your blog to rank on the search engines, you’ll need to edit the site’s meta data. HeadSpace2 helps you do just that, quickly and easily.

If you’ve got any to add to our list, leave us a comment!

We all have days when we need to write a post or article, but just can’t think of what to do.

In times like these, I like to dip into my bag of cliches and fire up one of four tried and tested methods for putting a post together:

1: Get someone else to create your content!

This one actually needs you to do some networking. By networking, I of course mean “sitting on Twitter asking questions”. Everyone has hopes, aspirations and opinions. Give your followers a platform and publicity, and they’ll sit there writing content that you’re free to use. Just slap some witty or insightful book-ends on there, and voila! Blog post, ready to roll.

2: The Short Sharp Shock

Who says a blog article has to be long, involved and in-depth? Well, most people. Luckily, what people say and what people do are different things. You can get away with a short two paragraph article every now and then, so long as you’re witty and succinct. Sometimes a packet of crisps is more satisfying than a three-course meal.

3: All Aboard The Bandwagon!

Bandwagon jumping. With access to trend information at our fingertips, it’s never been so easy to see what people are talking about. It’s also never been so easy to see what other people are saying – so just pick something you disagree with and write about why that person is wrong. About half the article’s done for you already. Magic.

4: The List Post

This one’s the daddy of all cliches. List posts are easy to think up, easy to write and easy to read. Anyone can come up with a list, at any time, in any place. I thought up this very article whilst lying on the couch watching Loose Women.

Easy!

So we’re throwing our next guide open to you readers. What do you want to see from us?

What topics can we cover that’d help you make the most of your online marketing campaign?

Leave us a comment, and we’ll see if we can help.

Hosting that Meets the Needs of Your Business

So how does all this affect your hosting and SEO? Well, to help cope with the ever-shifting sea of search results, search engines will rapidly move an unavailable website down the rankings until it comes back online. This often causes downed websites to disappear in a matter of days, rather than weeks. Doing this allows the search engines to preserve their quality of search for users and ensure they rarely recommend a link that is broken. If people begin clicking your broken link, If you have a problem with hosting that is addressed quickly, you can expect your site to reappear back up to where you were fairly rapidly. However, if the problem persists for any length of time – say, a week or more – it will have far-reaching consequences for your search position which may take months to claw back.

I like to compare it to your shop or business premises – you wouldn’t dream of tolerating a building with major structural problems, where the electricity cuts out periodically or the water stops running now and again. Having a server that occasionally experiences problems is just like politely asking all your customers to leave until the issues with the shop are resolved. Do this regularly enough and some of the customers will stop coming back entirely!

The Importance of Getting Your Hosting Right

Getting your hosting right will provide a solid foundation upon which to build a successful online presence. But speed and reliability are just two ongoing factors. Before you begin building, it is important to consider the technical needs of your website are met in the same way your premises must meet the needs of your business. Do you need database support for an online shop, blog or content management system? Will there be sufficient file and SQL space for your website to grow? Do you have special requirements such as HTTPS and SSL which will allow you to take payments online?

As always, all of these questions can be easily answered by thinking about your target audience, and their needs. Doing this before you start building will help ensure you minimise any potential future headaches and avoid most major obstacles when promoting your site.

As we all may or may not know, blogs are a good source of information and back linking into your site from your blog posts it builds your site’s credibility on the Internet – which is important!

Test carried out
I wanted to test whether using an external blog was better than using an internal blog. I started by creating one blog externally using one of WordPress’ domains and later added one internal blog to my actual site. Both are using WordPress so the only different factor is the domain which the blog is hosted on.

Findings
I found that the external blog was ok, but Google only picked up my post changes every month around the same time. This is fine but you obviously want your posts picked up ASAP, especially if you want to promote something on your site quickly.

I then added an internal WordPress blog a month later, which is on my own domain. WordPress gives you the files to upload; it does require some technical knowledge as you will need a MySQL database.

I then also added the XML sitemap add-on that WordPress provides; this is a must, as it tells search engines when you actually make the changes within the blog and what pages to crawl.

I found that the internal WordPress blog posts were picked up by the end of the first week in Google, which was fantastic. One obscure phrase that I knew I could get fast ranking on was my site name – which was also included in my domain. By the end of the first week the internal blog was already ranking above my own site for its own site name!

Summary
Neither of the above methods is perfect, but there is a third way to structure your blog. I have come to find that this third way is the best method as it:

A: Lets Google pick up your posts faster.
B: Improves your site’s ranking

Here’s what you need to do
Firstly, you need to create a new domain, something like [www.companyname-blog.co.uk]. Then upload the Word Press files onto this domain, get everything set up and use your new blog domain to link back into your main site. That way it will help your sites rankings, and all changes to posts will get picked up a lot quicker.

Something I have left out is back link building, this is also crucial to the blogs credibility! This I will cover in a later post, so make sure you check back soon.

How Blogs Can Work for Your Business

An increasing number of people are blogging for business, why? Well, firstly search engines love rolling content and news pages. Unlike static web pages, the benefit of a news or blog section comes from the regularly updated content and steady stream of informative articles. The great part is you can write about anything that takes your fancy, provided it is somehow related to your industry, business or products. Although you may not realise, you probably have a wealth of knowledge which the average Joe Public would need to do some serious Wiki-ing to unearth. By gradually releasing little bits of this knowledge on a regular basis, you will give search engines a very good reason to see you as an authoritative source of news and will quickly find your articles ranking well for related search terms. Blogs can be used to announce the launch of your new products, perhaps offer a review and some customer feedback or advice, or it might cover events happening in your industry or even company news. Whatever your niche, try to think about your customers and imagine what type of information they would find useful. Provided you can think of at least one type of person who would be moderately interested, you should write it!

Blogging Opens the Twitter Door

Once you are comfortable adding to your blog, the next logical step is building up your company’s official Twitter account. Twitter is so easy to use and so effective at promoting websites that some people often accuse it of being one giant spam machine. The goal is finding as many genuine followers as possible, each of who will see any updates you post. You can post short snippets of news, or links to articles in your blog. Each time you add a new blog entry, be sure to copy and paste the address of your new post into your Twitter update bar with a little text describing the article. It becomes a source of clicks for people who are interested in the headline, and there are some fantastic Twitter applications appearing that will help kick-start and manage your account. Twittgeek.com will automatically follow people based on a keyword you choose. The great thing about this is that it ensures your message reaches people who have Tweeted about this topic in the past and are most likely to be interested in what you have to say.

Social Media SEO, Social Bookmarking and Article Back-links

There are some great sites out there besides Twitter that you should be submitting each article to, instead of building links for your site itself, you will be building links for your individual articles. Each site has a certain ‘knack’ to really get the most out of your social media SEO, but all are very easy to pick up and you will often find you get used to them by simply using them. A lot of SEO experts will slate digg.com because ‘power users really need to digg your article to really feel a big effect, but there are other advantages – Digg articles themselves will often rank very quickly in Google separately from your site, and when enough people click through from your Digg entry through to your actual blog entry, eventually Google will see it should be recommending your blog page high up, and will often ‘flip’ the URLs, giving you a chance to rank for some quite competitive terms if your article is an interesting enough read. Reddit.com entries will generally not rank very well in Google, but has a fantastic number of users and does not insist on categories, allowing it to become a neat little traffic source all of it’s own. Be sure to give your articles a full description here in the ‘extra text’ section. You can submit either blog entries or entire sites to Stumble Upon, and it is worth finding several relevant categories for your article if you can! There are other generic social bookmarking sites such as delicious.com, diigo.com, Yahoo Bookmarks and Google Bookmarks that are worth using.

Making Facebook and Youtube Work For you

Facebook now allows organisations and companies to open up official Facebook accounts. This is something else that is quick to do, and quite a lot of fun. Be sure to make all employees are members of the group, so that all can contribute to your Facebook profile. Also, be sure to link back to your site and post any links to articles here too! Similarly, some may find themselves in industries where they have videos that might be uploaded to Youtube. Remember, that plenty of people use YouTube on a regular basis, and it would be worth including a link back to your site from the description of each YouTube video you post. You can also embed videos from YouTube into your site fairly easily.

Why Social Media is Best Done Yourself

In a nutshell, there are some more expensive SEO companies who will provide the social media side of SEO as part of the service. But my advice would be that social media SEO is something best done yourself. Why? Well, only you have the industry insider knowledge and deal with your customers on a regular basis, and will therefore understand them better than any SEO consultant. It is also completely free to do your social media SEO, and allocating just one hour each day, or perhaps a couple of hours each week is enough to really see a noticeable impact on your SEO.

1999 – Larry Page and Sergey Brin invent Google…

Now, a good ten years since anything of note has happened to the online world, comes another Earth-shattering and epoch-defining moment:

 October 2009 – FirstFound launch The FirstFound Blog!  

 That’s right. Leading UK search engine consultants FirstFound have finally decided to enter the blogosphere, ten years after the company first formed. Still, good things come to those who wait, and you’ll be treated to all of the SEO news, insights and tips that your heart could desire.

 That’s not all though – this isn’t just another SEO blog. We’ve put together our company’s best and brightest minds to offer everything from social media strategies and E-commerce advice to web development assistance and PPC hints. We’ll even be giving you reviews of the latest movies, and developments from the world of sport.

 What we offer isn’t set in stone. We want to hear from you, our readers, to find out what you want in a blog. If you think we’re wittering on too much about Twitter, or we’ve completely ignored an important development from Google HQ, let us know.

 For now though, sit back, relax and enjoy The FirstFound Blog. You never know. You might just learn something.

 This week, Andrew’s been working like a dog to get content ready for the site, and isn’t going to let some Johnny-come-lately steal the kudos that comes with the first post.