Welcome to this week's MIND your business podcast, brought to you by the MINDs at MIND Development and Design and our friends at Fresh Roasted Hosting. Give us your tired, your poor, your technically frustrated. We will help you! Accomplishment will prove to be a journey...NOT a destination! Good ol' Ike...President Dwight Eisenhower said those words. And for my MIND compadres at our cerebral cortex in Lancaster, PA...I can hear the "OLD" jokes already, but Eisenhower was out of office before I was born...so cut me some slack. LOL We are here for YOU...we want you to get the best out of your website and we're here to give you the lowdown...the straight skinny...whatever you wanna call it. We want to educate you and empower you with regard to your business website and getting the most out of it. If you have questions about web development, design, SEO, content marketing, PPC, social media and what it all means to your business, please hit us up on Facebook with your questions, email us at info@minddnd.com or just hit that big beautiful and quite lovely "Ask A Question" button to your right on our website. Now...on with the show! This week, we're talking about guest blogging...the latest area that has been spammed by black hat SEO's to the point where some of you actually believe that it doesn't work anymore. Au contraire, moom frair! It DOES work...it's a GREAT way to expand your audience and get legitimate links back to your website...but it takes time and effort to do it PROPERLY! Those old cliche's are hard at work here...what you give is what you get...garbage in, garbage out. Ask not what your website can do for you, Ask what you can do for your website! I don't know what my stinkin' presidential fixation is today, but I'm just rolling with it. We're talking about guest blogging this week...both giving and receiving...and some guidelines you should follow in that arena. Guest blogging was practically INVADED by black hat SEO's in the wake of Penguin in 2012. The reason for this is because when Google's Penguin update was first unleashed, it totally blew up the various link schemes that black hat SEO's were using. Destroyed them to the point where these black hat SEO's and SEO's who really didn't know what they were doing got caught with their proverbial pants down and their clients suffered. Seriously...many businesses went belly up because their SEO's were engaging in black hat link tactics like link wheels and such. This invasion of the guest blogging medium by black hat SEO's has actually been amusing and at times humourous. What happens, in a nutshell, is that black hat SEO's offer poorly written (sometimes auto-generated) content to website owners as guest blog posts. At that point, one of two things happens. 1) The website owner doesn't really care about quality and just wants the content...ANY content...so they accept it either knowingly or blindly without checking. OR 2) The website owner doesn't know good or bad content when they see it and unfortunately doesn't get help when they REALLY, REALLY need it. Some of you are shaking your heads right now, right along with me. Here we go...left, right, left, right, left, right...etc. There's a reason, however, that there's so much lousy reading online. It's getting better, mind you, but there's a lot of bad content. It's getting better overall...but that's because the search engines - Google in particular - aren't giving you a choice and it's really sad that it has come to this. I have told my 17-year-old son for years that to make your way in this world you're going to have to adhere to some really dumbed-down rules and regulations. It comes down to the difference between LAW and ETHICS. LAW is the bare MINIMUM of what you have to do to be considered at least a somewhat civilized human being. ETHICS is what you REALLY know you SHOULD be doing. Ethics requires CONSCIENCE and COURTESY because it's a demonstration of how we ourselves want to be treated. There's a lot of selfishness in this human condition, though, and it has taken its toll on SEO and Internet marketing as a whole. Now you may be asking yourself...why is this guy on this ethical diatribe? Or maybe you're not and your angry that I'm putting words in your mouth, but just bear with me. lol We're going to talk a bit about both giving and receiving guest blog content. First we'll look at giving and how your ethics are so important here. When you're offering content for another website or blog site to post, you're sending the message that what you're offering is so good that you would post it on your own site...but you're not because you want to expand your audience and get some legitimate links back to your website. It's the truth...embrace it! The websites and blogs that you are submitting your content to or WILL be submitting your content to KNOW that you want links back to your website. If you're a SMART business owner, CEO or whatever, you will want those links to be associated with EXCELLENT and TRULY helpful content. It's that simple. When you're submitting content for consideration as a guest post on another website, it's YOUR job to make sure that content is so good that you would legitimately post it on your own site. Seriously...the key to successful guest blogging is offering content that you would sincerely offer on your OWN site. Project your own personal standard onto the material you offer to others. The INSANE part of this is that there are unfortunately a lot of business owners who treat this as an afterthought and that's a HUGE mistake. This whole thing is a conundrum, too, because you want to put your best content on your own website...YET you want to offer the same quality as a guest blogger. Here's the main key for you...while in a perfect world you want your best content on your own website, you must look at the big picture. Holding your guest blogging content up to the same standard that you have for your own website content (provided that you maintain a high standard - hint hint)...it means two things that are beneficial to you: 1) As long as you maintain a sincerely high standard with your guest blog posts, your stress level and blood pressure will be lower because you know that you are truly offering high quality work...high quality content to these sites. 2) These posts which are opening you up to a wider audience are of a high quality that reflects well on you and your business. Think about those points and you'll be shaking your head along with me with regard to people treating guests posts as an afterthought. They're really, really valuable to you. When we come back...we're going to talk about how to scrutinize guest blog submissions to your OWN website! =================== And we are BACK on the MIND Your Business podcast. In that first segment we talked about the Italian Competition Authority and the $610k fine they slapped on TripAdvisor for failing to prevent fake negative reviews on their site. Now what does this really mean to YOU? How does something like this affect YOUR business? Well, it doesn't affect your business in a super direct kind of way, but the affect on your business is twofold...and the effect on your business is to make your blog and social media profiles even MORE important to your SEO mix than they already were. Now, as I explained in the first part of the show, these online review sites are IN THEORY a good idea. The problem is the human element. First off...many of us don't necessarily trust "professional" reviews in newspapers, magazines, etc. because while there are some legitimate reviews, there has been enough favoritism and funny business that has gone on over the years to where we've become a little skeptical. After all THOSE people are getting PAID to do their reviews...PAID to give their opinions...and not necessarily every publication is willing to give a less than stellar review of a restaurant or other business who is a paid advertiser. Some of you are bristling with that statement, but you know it's true. It all comes down to money...and where there is money there is the possibility of human compromise. Now, I'm not saying that these kinds of reviews can NEVER be trusted...I'm merely pointing out the fact that there has been enough compromise over the years to where we don't trust them like we once did. We needed a better platform to get truthful reviews. Wow...here comes the internet! Finally...we can get REAL reviews from REAL people and get a better idea of what restaurant to bring our date to this weekend...a better idea of what mechanics we can trust to get a fair deal with car repairs...a better idea of where we should have our wedding...a better idea of where we should buy our next computer or printer. The list goes on and on. Google and the rest of the search engines originally saw the validity in these review sites and thought the same thing we did. In addition, they thought "Hey...we can incorporate these review sites into our search algorithm and make it easier for people to find these reviews for the products and services they seek!" And so it was done. Problem is, as I previously mentioned, that unscrupulous business types saw the potential in leaving fake negative reviews on their competitors' profiles on these review sites...under fake names, of course. Add to that the aforementioned ridiculous hysterical reviews and you've got a quagmire (giggity giggity) of questionable information. This basically has left the search engines exactly where we as consumers were with regard to the "professional reviews" in publications. NOT totally discounting them, but having enough doubt to want to search for a better resource. All it takes is a reasonable doubt, people. So now the search engines are looking at your blog. They're looking at your social media profiles. They're looking at your ENGAGEMENT and INTERACTION with your audience. The search engines believe THIS is where they can find the real truth. And they're right. How often are you posting to your blog? How often are you posting to your social media? WHAT are you posting on your blog? Is it engaging and are people sticking around to read it and possibly comment? What are you posting on your social media? It it engaging and are you getting any interaction with your audience? Are broadcasting your blog posts ON your social media profiles? Are you CONSISTENT with both your blog posts and your social media posts? You see, the search engines have figured out that you can't truly fake honest interaction. NOT over the long haul. The search engines can see that you have 3 thousand Facebook followers or likes or whatever the hell they're going to be calling them by the time this podcast comes out. They see that you have 3,000 likes but are lucky to get even ONE or TWO comments or "thumbs ups" when you do a post. That does not look too good. Granted, it DOES take time to build an audience...but you have to be consistent to do it and the search engines can see that as well. The bottom line is that SEO is no longer JUST about getting found. It's about improving engagement with your content by your audience. It's about USER EXPERIENCE and that engagement and experience is now factored into the search algorithms and is as much of a determining factor in your ranking as ALMOST anything else. Write with your audience in mind, with your users in mind...first and foremost! What information will interest them and encourage them to leave a comment and contribute to the conversation? Sometimes your users can give YOU a helpful piece of information. Write for your users, have clear calls-to-action on your website and make sure your website is as intuitive as possible. Don't make people have to dig too deep for the information they seek. Make it as easy as possible because if it gets too difficult for them, it becomes easier to just click over to your competitor's website and just start over. Thank you for tuning into this week's MIND Your Business podcast, presented by the minds at MIND Development and Design...and our good friends over at Fresh Roasted Hosting...a good homegrown PA company! Send us your questions on Facebook, on our Ask A Question page on the website or email us...info@minddnd.com. We'll see you next week!