I really love my job, I get to help businesses, primarily car dealers, explore blogging and one thing that I need to do more of to help others who read my blog is make good recommendations when they come up.

Why I Joined Chris Brogans Blog Topics Group

I saw the Blog Topics Group as a new opportunity to connect and network with some passionate bloggers who are all trying to improve the quality of their blog and learn some of the veteran blogging tips from Chris and others in this group.

The opportunity is something I will highly encourage all of my clients to join because it will help them understand that posting on a blog is only a small fraction of what you need to do in order to make it successful.

Examples of What I Hope To Learn

• Create Good Quality Content That Inspires Readers To Comment And Share
• Learn Some Tips On How To Create A Call To Action For My Posts
• Suggestions On Linking And Commenting To Other Blogs
• Measuring Effectiveness of Posts and Comments
• Create A Good Series of Posts That Follow a Topic – Weekly or Monthly
• Showing Appreciation For Every Comment And Responding
• Becoming Better At Timeliness of Posting – Press Release, etc.
• Understanding and Explaining the Value Of A Blog To Share With My Clients And Prospects

I’m not sure if this list will all be part of what I take away, but I think it is a start of some things I should be discussing on this blog as I discover them.

What I Think Blogging Means For Businesses

I feel that a good blog can be better than any form of traditional advertising or marketing. Blogging is indirect marketing, it allows you to speak about important subjects, allows you to share good ideas, and most of all it gives people a deeper understanding of what you do and why you do it. For those reasons, a blog delivers the true face of a business in ways no other form of media can accomplish.

I look forward to learning some tips and suggestions and would love to have anyone comment on this post if they are also interested in learning any of this type of stuff and I’ll be glad to write about topics my readers show interest in.

One other recommendation, while on the subject of blog topics is to allow guest posts on your blog, as well as write some guest posts and pitch them to blogs that have relevant interests or subject matter. I’m a member of My Blog Guest and I’ve had some great success with it. It’s free to join, and I’d highly suggest doing so even if it’s to see how that process works because Ann has done a tremendous job at building such a valuable service for bloggers.

Good Content Wins

Google has officially taken steps to give sites that create original content the benefit they deserve. This algorithm change is going to hurt sites that scrape and repurpose content and wrap it with ads, aka content farms.

This is something I suspected would happen eventually, despite all the talk in the SEO community that it may never happen.

If there were ever a time for businesses to invest in creating a ton of high quality content then now is that time. The sites that offer new content regularly will probably increase because of the freshness of it, and it will become harder for them to be outranked unless another site comes along thats producing as good or better content as judged by their peers in social media.

Get Your Writers Writing Again

Great insight here:

But I doubt we’ll see real progress. Instead, I expect Google’s unwillingness to address this issue to create a critical-mass demand — and hopefully, then, a supply — of good content, reference information, and product recommendations.

Write Quality and Join Others Doing Same

I recently joined a new Blog Topics Group where topic ideas are shared and helpful tips on how to create engaging content can lead to more successful blogging.

Sounds to me like Google is trying to act in the interests of searchers and good media in general, because the result of having good content in search means that more will go back to writing as there could be hope that someone might actually be able to find it amongst all the garbatrage.

Hosting a webinar this morning, basics on the wordpress backend and tips for dealers. Send a tweet to @tuneyfish for an invite.

http://www.tuneyfish.com/blog/dealer-blogs/dealer-webinars-blog-seo-dealers/

SEO is nothing more than great content which is organized and structured for easy consumption.

So let’s look into these three items:

content, organization/structure, consumption

What is great content?

This is a very objective question, but I think in terms of this post we’ll stick to what I believe the search engines consider great.

Since search engines cannot read and comprehend text they must rely on other elements to signify quality. Some examples of this could be:

Images
Links
Infographics
Comments
Freshness
Site topic
Frequency
Language
Passion

I’m sure some of you may think why did I add passion if search engines can’t read or comprehend but how could they possibly sense passion.

I think of passion in terms of measuring how well the site meets certain criteria in the way that it names images, titles, links, categories and an overall respect for the visitor in getting the answer to what they looked for.

There probably isn’t much need to go into each of those above examples since doing so may take away from the intent for having engaged dialogue between comments about what they mean. Since giving them a definition may or may not help you, I’d rather hear if you agree with the list.

Let’s look at the organization and structure.

When people visit your site from a search query the visitor was either invited or just happened to be driving by.

Let’s look at each one independently.

Design Websites Like Gas Stations

A new website without an invitation is like a storefront without a name or windows. Its sitting out in the middle of the desert with no roads leading to it, or any indication that somebody is in it.

On the contrary, a storefront out in the desert that has a big sign next to the road with numbers on it like $3.29 could predictably house something you are in need of. Regardless, it takes only a fraction of a second to know what it is and what you can get from it.

Having these identifiable features allows for a pretty predictable experience should you stop. So what I’m getting at here is the gas station is something we see every day in our mind is not have to wonder or determine its purpose.

In addition, gas stations don’t need to seek out their customers because you either need it or you don’t and there’s not much between.

The Internet for example is like a highway with a billion stores along side of it. In the early days of the Internet we relied on others to give us directions, and directories served as maps.

Today we use search engines to find destinations but care little about the path that leads to it. These paths have no explanation other than our brain giving us an impulse that we then act on. The problem with that is that our brains are traveling at speeds that nothing can match.

It’s been known that the human brain contains unexplainable power and resource yet we seek ways to find out how that is.

Structure of Content

If we were to know how our brains were structured to the degree that we knew everything about how they function then we would create everything to follow that structure. The reason being it requires virtually zero effort to understand the gas station, yet the Internet contains exactly the opposite.

Every day we go on the Internet to find information, and instantly we find it. Anything that enters our mind whether we know about it or not we can instantly find.

This has been extraordinarily useful but we’ve underestimated the value of it being structured and have relied on search because there is no structure.

Our minds have become accustomed to search and its infinite path that has no destination. This is why structure of the website is so important that we bring order and purpose to it.

If there was something that actually seem to function like a human brain it could be a search engine. We simply have no understanding of how they classify or organize information, store information, index information we just know it’s there. The brain seems to be just as mysterious as search engines.

So when we land on a website we desperately wish it to be structured. If we land on a website and resort to search than we are likely predicting our answer will be found. For this to be true, we would have to be in a website with tons of content. If your website is not full of content then you must have it structured.

Consumption of Content

As we navigate our searches for information we are presented with a page of choices. We know that if we select one of them we are going to get something entirely unique than what we would’ve gotten should we have selected a different one.

We usually select and consume content that matches almost identically to our queries. We look for words that are similar to the ones that we’ve entered expecting to find out answers. Searching for a SEO tips might have a ton of results which may prompt us to redefine the query to the SEO title tips. If we see a page of results that contain the Seo title examples, SEO title suggestions, SEO title ideas, a SEO title tricks, we could click on any of these but the one that had our query in the description tag would get the click.

This is likely due to the fact we have found not only our answer but an extension related to our answer that could give us an even deeper understanding of what we’re looking for and potentially new ways to search for.

So if we understand how we crave information and guidance from relevant terms we can develop a content that fits with the processes that we consume it.

What we just went over was an in-depth look into the three elements of what might represent remarkable content in the way that our brains in the search engines might consider to be accurate. The next step is to figure out how we can utilize this information in order to ensure our content has these needed elements.

You can read our next post which covers the actual steps we use to create it and most importantly structure it into specific collections so that when someone sees your website it’s like seeing something as simple as a gas station so that when they come in it’s for a purpose. But when they leave, they leave with something that they intended to receive by stopping by.

What’s New Media?

Is it what Wikipedia says it is? Is it Twitter, Youtube, Facebook? iPhone, Android, or is it none of the above?

Ok, if we want to know what New Media is, first what’s Old Media?

Media = Television
Media = Newspapers
Media = Radio
Media = Magazines
Media = Junk Mail
Media = Catalogs

Television        News, Shows, Movies, Commercials, MTV, PBS, Discovery Channel
Newspapers    NY Times, WSJ, Detroit News, Seattle Times
Radio               AM, FM, satellite
Magazines      Road And Track, Better Homes and Gardens, This Old House
Junk Mail       Valupaks, Postcard offers, Brochures, To The Resident At
Catalogs          Sears, Summit Racing

What is happening to Old Media?

It’s still there, content is still alright, it’s easy to get your hands on. So why is it losing the battle against New Media?

New Media = Now Media

Before TV it was families gathering around the radio to hear the broadcast of a show in the evening before going to bed. Then TV became 24/7, but it still was only what “they” decided to broadcast. You were lucky if you came across a good movie or show if you had time to sit and watch it, but for the most part it was at night when the prime time stuff aired.

So there was a shift somewhere, but what was it, what made us stop listening to Old Media?

What made the show that aired last night that draw 65 million people across US so interested in it, what was so compelling about it that it could draw that big of an audience?

Other People

That’s it, that’s all there is to it.

People do what they see others doing.

Want to become famous, get others to see what you do? That’s it!

Hmm, I don’t know how to get people to notice me.

Well, just to use Old Media as an example and perhaps a template, think about this. When a new show aired, was that the biggest ratings it would ever see? No. It grows organically, week after week, more and more people discover it. People tell others when to watch for it, where to watch for it, so do that.

New Media, Now Media, whatever you want to call it, just start thinking like it and you’ll understand it.

New is something you’ve never experienced, people crave new. Like a new pair of shoes, or a new car, or a new friend.
Now is something you have to have immediately. You need it more than anything else and anything that gets in your way is irrelevant, because you need things done NOW!

Combine New and Now and you will get whatever it is you want. How?

Where is Now? Twitter.
Where is New? You.

You are new, not everyone knows you yet. Why you? Because you get it.

People want to associate with people who get it, who are new and exciting, and who are available now.

One example. Blogs.

Ever read one where it seems like it’s not updated (old as opposed to new)
Ever read one where it seems like nobody is there? (no comments)
Ever return if either of the above is true, not likely.
Why?

You want new, you want now, and you want to be around others because the thoughts of many are more compelling than the thoughts of a few.

So you’ve read this far, what to do?

Leave a comment and Retweet This but just keep in mind New is You!

Is Edmunds Stealing From You? - That was the title of Alex Snyder’s post yesterday on www.dealerrefresh.com when he noticed that Edmunds was bidding on his dealership brand name and reselling the leads back to them.  Leads that should have come through the organic results that his business was already ranking highly for.  

Alex’s post quickly caught the attention of several dealers who decided to voice their concerns about this questionable practice.  The comments started rolling in as more issues began to surface like the targeting of cities which in many cases also happen to be part of the dealership name.

It doesn’t take long to see how Edmunds and several others like them have been able to build substantial traffic volume on their sites.  The biggest argument being their use of business names, addresses and contact information to flood the search engines with content.  

Do a quick search for “ford dealer” on Google, filter the past 24 hours, and you’ll see Edmunds indexed with nearly 1000 new pages of content.  Looking at those results and you might see Edmunds own employees posting in forums to update a thread.  More content.

Luckily Google seems to be tweaking things to give the real content producers some of the spotlight, as people begin to realize that these larger sites aren’t bringing any real unique content.

These sites spend millions of dollars with Google on Adwords, because they make many times that selling the leads they get to the dealers.  As people become more aware of this activity, they will realize that clicking on those ads is not the right thing to do.  So before Google starts to look like the bad guy, they are starting to crack down on these unethical business practices.

The solution is to create compelling content and to do so regularly so your site doesn’t fall off the rankings.