If you are looking at launching a corporate blog for SEO purposes, you likely understand that the quality of the writing is critical to its success. You need to move beyond bland SEO copywriting and create content that is unique, educational and helps readers understand the industry that your business is in. But having a successful corporate blog is about more than just the content. Much of your blog’s success will depend on the four steps you take before you write a single word of copy.

Branding: You want your blog to be memorable so that people come back to it. Along with creating compelling content, you can do this with the branding of your blog. Come up with a creative name that goes beyond COMPANY NAME Blog. Create a logo that is fun and will tell readers what to expect from your blog. Use color schemes in the design that are eye-catching (and match your corporate branding if you do this). You can often do this while choosing the theme of your blog if you are using a popular blogging service such as WordPress.

Develop a Content Strategy: Depending on your line of business, you might be overwhelmed with potential blog post ideas or trying to figure out how to create content on a regular basis. Having a content strategy in place from the beginning will help you determine the right topics to pursue with your writing. Do research on the content already on your site to see what topics, keywords or types of content is most popular with your visitors. You can use this as a guide to help you determine where to focus your blog writing energy.

Build Social Media Hooks Into Your Blog: If you want your blog posts to spread and potentially “go viral,” you need to give readers a way to share them. Making it easy for readers to share links to your blog posts via social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook and Reddit is a must. Make sure that every post ends with a way for people to share your story with one click – there are several services you can use to automatically generate this at the end of each post. It’s also important to give readers a way to subscribe to your blog so they automatically receive new blog posts.

Set the Tone of Your Blog: As much of the success of your blog will come down to how you say something versus what exactly you are saying. The tone of your blog should match the expectations of your readers. If your company is a retail business selling fun items, you can have a quirky, humorous tone that will get people to laugh. Blogs that are aimed toward a more technical audience will need to be drier and be straightforward. No matter what your tone is, the blog needs to provide useful and educational information about your products and your industry.

When most people think about how public relations tactics can help their SEO campaigns, the first thing that comes to mind is to write press release. While it’s true that well-crafted, keyword-rich and interactive news releases crafted by press release writing services can help your SEO and your marketing efforts, press releases are far from the only public relations tactics that can boost your search engine rankings.

Some of these tactics involve establishing your company as an authoritative brand within the space; others involve marketing efforts that also benefit others. All of these tactics can help you generate publicity and help with your SEO:

Make Charitable Contributions: Being a good corporate citizen serves several purposes. A donation to a worthy charity helps people in need and can be a tool for your own promotion. Work with the charity to promote your donation. You can get creative and come up with a charity angle that is unique and will attract media attention.

Hold Unique Contests: Running a contest like a scholarship essay competition or product giveaway serve several purposes. They can generate social media links to serve as social signals; they can provide drive brand awareness; and they can provide reasons for media stories that will also boost your SEO. Making the contests unique and interesting — such as a food eating contest — helps.

Be a Guest Contributor: Pitch the executives at your company as “guest contributors” to local, national and industry media outlets and blogs. If customers read intriguing content with their names attached to it, they will think of them — and your brand — as thought leaders in the field. You can use ghostwriters for the content if needed and attach a name later.

Serve as Guest Talent: Many industries have TV or radio shows specific to their market. Get your executives to appear on these shows. It will help your brand and create links from the shows’ websites that will boost your SEO.

Speak at Industry Events: Getting your executives in front of convention attendees is a great tool for increasing visibility and creating links. You can host your own event as well.

Google recently announced the launch of a new feature that places search results for “in-depth” articles of more than 2,000 words prominently on its Search Engine Results Page (SERP). It’s the logical next step of Google’s campaign to improve the overall quality of search results. Previous updates such as Panda had punished low-quality and off-topic content. Featuring in-depth articles highly on a results page serves as the reward for people such as SEO copywriting services which produce high-quality and relevant content.

In terms of SEO, the addition of in-depth articles has the potential to be a game-changer. With these articles receiving such a prominent place on Google’s SERP, it makes sense to put significant emphasis on creating this sort of content. Whether you plan on using outside article writing services like eVisible or creating the content yourself, it’s important to know the basics of how to create the right copy and specifically why evergreen content is so important for these in-depth articles.

What is Evergreen Content?

Much like its name implies, evergreen content are articles and blog posts that are always “fresh” and never get old. This means the content isn’t related to news stories that will change over time or become irrelevant. The ideal bit of evergreen content gives readers information that will as useful to them years later as it is when it is first published.

Why is this so important? By making this content relevant over a long period of time, you will be able to see the benefits of traffic and site rankings from it for months or even years to come. Finding the right topics is often one of the most important elements in creating great evergreen content.

You can use many of the same tools that you would use for your SEO research when planning your evergreen content. Keyword research tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner will give you an idea of the types of keywords that are being searched for over long stretches of time. You can augment this research by tracking your older posts using Google Analytics to see which topics perform the best or use Google Trend to identify hot topics that may be relevant over the long haul.

Best Topics for Evergreen Content

As you read articles on the Internet, you’ll notice certain types of articles come up again and again. This is because their formats lend themselves naturally to evergreen content. When you are looking at creating in-depth articles for SEO purposes, consider some of these story ideas:

• “Best” Lists (“Best Restaurants in New York”)
• Top 5 or Top 10 Lists ( “Top 10 Tourist Attractions in London”)
• “How To” Articles (“How to Fix a Leaky Faucet”)
• Beginner’s Guides (“Beginner’s Guide to SEO”)
• Funny/Worst Compilations (“Worst Band Names”)

Writing Your Evergreen Content

The first thing to do when writing your evergreen content is to understand your audience. If it’s a technical audience, you can use more complicated and advanced terms. From there, do your research and use that as the basis for the outline to your article. With more than 2,000 words to write, it’s easy for in-depth articles to lose focus without an outline.

More than anything else, you need to make sure that your content is truly evergreen and that it’s is uniquely valuable. If it’s information that people can get somewhere else, it won’t be as valuable. Even if it’s on a topic that’s been written about before, put your own spin on it. This will increase the chances that it is shared by readers, increasing overall clicks while also sending valuable social signals to Google about the quality of the piece.

Attempting to determine the proper tactics for mobile SEO has been a mystery in the past. Google has given few clues about how to approach mobile design as part of professional website development. But things have changed in recent years as Google has started to give some major hints on the types of elements that they consider important for mobile sites. There are three ways to handle mobile content and Google has recommendations for each method:

Use a New URL

In many cases, web designers decide to direct mobile users to a completely different URL to access content. When this happens, Google would like to see the link canonical tag on mobile pages to direct to the desktop version of the site and the link alternate tag on desktop pages to direct to the mobile version of the site.

Google also wants separate user agent redirection lists to be set up for different types of mobile users. For example, a user of a Samsung Android phone will be directed by the server differently than the user of an iPhone. This integrates responsive design into the equation, changing the layout to fit the specific screen width of the device.

Same URL With Different HTML

Another way to approach mobile design is to use the same URL for desktop and mobile versions of the site but have the two sites have different HTML. When doing this, Google recommends adding a Vary HTTP header to the server response. This will allow Google to read and crawl both the mobile and desktop versions of the URL.

Same URL and HTML

This is the preferred method of handling mobile and desktop sites by Google. In this case, you would use CSS3 media queries to create different looks for the site. Google prefers this method for several reasons. Two of the most common reasons for implementing this approach is because it brings all ranking metrics to one URL and it is very easy to implement.

Nothing is more frustrating than spending weeks or even months to redesign your website, only to see traffic plummet soon after the new version of the site goes live. It’s especially frustrating because you obviously did all the work because you expected to improve your search engine ranking, get more traffic and see more conversions. Where did it all go wrong?

In most cases, there is no single culprit; it’s usually a series of small mistakes that, on their own, would create minimal damage to your traffic but when taken together can be disastrous. Here are four of the most common problems we’ve found at eVisible when people try to relaunch their sites and their traffic tanks:

Check Google Analytics

It’s possible that your site’s analytic tracking didn’t automatically restart when your new site was launched. Manually check Google Analytics to make sure that it’s enabled and working properly; if it isn’t, check individual pages for issues like missing tracking code placement.

Recheck Google Analytics

You can also go deeper with your analytic research to see if there are unforeseen problems. Make sure that you have 301 redirects for any pages whose address structures have changed and thoroughly look for any 404 pages. Do a keyword search to see which keywords are underperforming and if they have been removed from poorly performing pages.

Review Your robots.txt File

It’s possible that your site has been deindexed for some reason. One possible explanation is with your robots.txt file. Check the head of page source code for a meta robots tag exclaiming noindex and also check for anything that says “disallow:/” in the code.

Check for Host or Server Issues

Changing your hosting or server can lead to communications issues that will make it impossible for search engines to index your site. There are several tools available for checking your DNS health; one thing you absolutely should do is look at your DNS errors and server connectivity in your Google or Bing Webmaster Tools.

Reworking your website to have a more SEO friendly design is a great way to boost your online business’ potential; it can also be intimidating, especially right before your new site goes live. Before you relaunch your site to the world, you need to go through a last-minute checklist to ensure that the launch will be a success. Here are 20 steps that you need to take when finalizing your professional website development:

Onsite Content:

1. Check that all of the content you’ve created – and the old content that you haven’t touched – is free of spelling errors, typos or other problems. Also make sure that the content is compelling for visitors.

2. Open your site in Google Chrome and press F12 and then open the “Network” tab to see your site’s speed and page sizes.

3. Test drive the forms on your site to make sure they work properly.

Web Development:

4. Verify that your site links are correct when they have transferred from the test site to your live site. If you have any 404 pages, develop a custom page with search to encourage visitors to go to other parts of your site. If pages are moved or have a new URL structure, make sure to use a 301 redirect.

5. Validate your W3C code and fix any errors you might have.

6. Add custom Favicons to your address bars or the tabs of users’ browsers to create a custom feel for your site.

7. Minify your site to compress the code and make it load faster.

Web Design

8. Cross-check your site on different browsers to ensure multi-browser compatibility.

9. Check that your display text is coming up when you hover over an image. You should also make sure that your images aren’t too large and that you don’t have issues with fonts not rendering correctly.

Search Engine Optimization

10. Make sure that all pages have title tags and meta tags.

11. Upload an accurate site map in both XML and HTML to make your site easier to navigate for users and search engines.

12. Have your Google Analytics package ready to go along with your Google and Bing Webmaster Tools. Also contact your ad rep if you have any PPC campaigns running to avoid a disruption.

13. Submit your site to the popular search engines to ensure they are indexed immediately.

14. Check to make sure that your SERP display is correct and your pages are displaying properly on search engine result pages.

15. Make sure that your social media buttons go to the right pages and allow people to “Like” the right parts of your site.

Network Administration:

16. Install site monitors to ensure visitors can get to your pages and use enhanced monitors for your key landing pages.

17. Run tests with load test software tools to simulate what will happen to your site in times of heavy traffic.

18. Have a backup system ready to go in case your site does crash.

19. Check password-protected pages to make sure people can’t get into them without the proper credentials.

20. If you have a secure certificate, check it to make sure it is valid on launch day.

SEO has changed the way that we look at online marketing. It’s led to companies getting smarter about how they develop their online marketing strategy and how they can incorporate many tactics to improve their search engine ranking. However, some people seem to think that SEO is a quick fix that eliminates the need for traditional online marketing.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. While SEO is a powerful tool, it should only be one part of an integrated online marketing game plan. In fact, misunderstanding the role of SEO has led some people to develop warped ideas about online marketing. Here are four of the most common misconceptions about online marketing that people have developed thanks to SEO:

You aren’t in a battle against Google. It’s easy to think that Google has something against you personally if you are struggling to take your search engine placement to the first page. Much of this comes from the fact that there is an air of mystery behind Google’s algorithms used in search engine rankings. Because of this, many online marketers wildly vary their campaigns to reflect what they think are Google’s latest changes. This is almost always just guesswork. Instead, companies should focus on making the core SEO values that don’t change such as quality content and not focus all of their efforts on pleasing Google.

You need to invest time – and money – into any successful SEO campaign. Search engine optimization is a great way to maximize your marketing budget and see instant results. However, that doesn’t mean that it’s “free” marketing. You still need to invest resources into an SEO campaign. This can including spending money on a link building campaign or time in researching keywords and developing appropriate content.

You won’t make money without offering something of value. While it’s true that you can get a site to the top of Google search pages simply by buying links, spun content and a low-quality website, will this make you money? Eventually, people are going to see the quality (or lack) of your offerings. It’s always better to base your success on high quality content and products.

Real world testing is better than solely relying on expert advice. It’s never a bad idea to do research and read articles from experts explaining things that have worked for them. But there’s no substitute for doing your own research and learning through trial and error.

Using SEO tactics to get customers to your website is great. After all, people need to find your site in order to use it. Companies know this – it’s why many spend significant amounts of time and resources on professional search engine marketing. However, getting people to visit your site is only part of the battle. If the content is weak or poorly written, or the layout is distracting and confusing, what is the point?

It’s easy for a web development consultant to spend so too much time worrying about SEO considerations and not enough thinking about customer usability; this often leads to websites that rank highly with search engines but have low conversion rates when it comes to translating web views into actual sales.

Don’t fall victim to this short-sighted approach to web development services. Instead, utilize these five tricks that will help boost your search engine rankings while also improving the interface and user experience for your customers:

Know Your Customer: There’s no such thing as the “typical” customer. But by doing some market research. you can understand what drives a potential customer in your category to make a purchasing decision. Remember that a website that works for one type of business might not be appropriate for another business.

Make Your Content Have a Point: The content on your website isn’t just there to fill space or serve as filler between optimized keywords. Think about the types of questions that you customers might have and design your text to clearly answer these questions.

Keep Graphics Simple and Clean: It’s easy to try and go overboard with graphics, colors and other design elements with laying out your website. After all, you want your site to be memorable and eye-catching. But in many cases, this means that your website will also be distracting and keep people from finding the links and information they need to make a purchasing decision.

Make Navigation Easy to Follow: One of the main reasons that people leave a website before making a purchase is because of poorly development site navigation. If they can’t easily find a link to the information they need, they’ll likely leave and try out a competitors’ site. Check your website design and make sure that customers can quickly get to the pages that lead to sales.

Track and Change: The work isn’t done when your website goes live. You need to track visitors, clickthrough rates and sales to determine what does and doesn’t work and make changes quickly if necessary.