Have you been here before? I do not just mean here at my blog, but have you been faced with questions or doubts about your efforts. Maybe you question whether people understand the intent and purpose of your blog, or maybe you question the intent and purpose of the blogs you read. These are legitimate considerations for a lot of bloggers, whether producers or readers.

I am a big proponent of blogging. In fact, if you just google “reasons to blog”, you can see that I am practically a poster child for the benefits of blogging. If you need encouragement, I suggest giving my list of “10 Really Good Reasons to Blog” a thorough read. If you need blogging tools, I would recommend “6 Essential Blogging Tools for Bloggers and Non-Bloggers“.

Let’s face it, great blogging is hard work. I have actually considered making a video of my steps to produce a blog article, but then I want to break my own fingers just to avoid the temptation of all the video editing on top of the other efforts.

What does it take to produce a blog article? Here is a one-sentence rundown for you: I get a bright idea, then I research, write, print, proofread, edit, print, give it to an editor, edit again, find a graphic, edit the graphic, categorize it, tag it, keyword it, write a description, produce an excerpt, record a podcast, upload podcast, tag the podcast, preview the article, edit it, preview it again, publish it, tweet it, facebook it, linkedin it, stumble it, reddit it, ping it, diigo it, mixx it delicious it, then watch my web stats and keep my fingers crossed while hoping that some people will digg it, stumble it, facebook it, and etecetera.

Blogging from experience may not seem all that revolutionary. After all, I suspect that if you write a blog, you probably already understand this. It is best to blog things you know, and know well. I want to drive the point a bit further and inspire you to use your experience, and to pull from the experience of others around you.

I will tell you where I find much of my inspiration, in hopes that it may help your creative process. When I reflect on my work, it is pretty easy to find blogging material directly from my daily life. I blog about things I know, but not just something I pulled out of the back reaches of my mind. I blog about things I have actually encountered … usually recently. Some of the best stuff comes from questions people ask me. When I hear something a few times, I start to think to myself “I’ll bet there are a lot of other people who would like to know more about this, too.” A great benefit of blogging this way is that it becomes “evergreen” blogging material which is useful for more than just the moment. It often becomes something people can look back into my archives and find useful months, or even years later.

I am not going to tell you to ignore search engines totally, but it is important that you strike a balance in favor of people over search engines. It is really easy to get caught in a trap of writing and optimizing everything just to be listed the most prominently in search engines.

I have written about a lot of SEO topics, provided a lot of useful blogging tools, and shared some really good reasons to blog. One thing that I am not so sure I have really said enough about is the notion of writing as if the search engines never existed.

I try to have this thought in my mind with every article I write, but even I am often caught in a trap. It is really easy to get a little too keyword choosy and worry yourself with keyword density and all the other SEO magic, to the point where it is no longer useful or interesting to the people who are ultimately your audience. Without them, you are kind of like a dog chasing a railroad train. What would you do with those search engine results without the people? I mean interested people who receive benefit from what you have to share with them.

My SEO tip today is about paying attention and taking action. There are about a squillion things that influence good SEO, and even more things are required to achieve great SEO. Paying attention to details can sometimes make the difference between good SEO and great SEO. Do I have your attention yet?

You are not, I repeat NOT going to get the best results that you seek from this article if you do not pay attention to detail. Good SEO has a lot to do with very fine details, and it often means paying attention to the details that the rest of your industry neglects. Today I am going to give you some thought-candy about the links which point to your website, but first, I am going to be sure that I have your full attention and that you are ready for this brain-exploding tip.

I think a lot of people try to make SEO seem a lot harder than it actually is. Really good SEO is actually quite tricky and time consuming, but there are many things that are pretty simple and tedious, but just need to be implemented properly. Knowing all of those simple and tedious tasks, and how they fit into the big picture of your search engine optimization strategy, and using them properly to receive optimal benefit is why people hire a search engine optimizer.

SEO: It is the art and science of getting your website listed in search engine results for more search terms and listed higher than all the others. This is a pretty important factor to website success … and business success. So, it would seem tragic if you had done almost all the right things, but then you just forgot some of the basics.

Nobody is perfect. We all forget things. I want to give you a reminder of something that I frequently find overlooked by WordPress blog owners when they set up a new blog, and as the blog grows. The basic principle can apply to any website, really. The little things really do add up, and this is a quick SEO tip that you can use to improve your SEO so fast that you may wonder why you ever neglected it.

In every industry there is a list to be on. You know, an industry “A” list. TopRank Online Marketing Blog works hard to maintain such a list in the online marketing industry. It is called the BIGLIST, and it is an A-Z list of search engine marketing and search engine optimization blogs. I agree with much of the list, but I found 26 different places where it was lacking. I will share my findings, but first, I will explain some things about my industry.

Links Rule SEO

Links are something that make or break SEO efforts. Anybody with a website should know this by now. Good SEO are particularly skilled at creating incoming links to websites, and rely on compelling content that people want to link to. Most SEO fail at linkbuilding, but the good ones have something special. Great SEO are some of the best hookers, because they “hook” you into reading what they have to say, and “hook” you into linking to it because you want to share it with others.

When I think of all the things I do to improve client’s search engine ranking, it is enough to make a non-SEO and non-geek’s head spin. It all gets so complicated and geeky that there should be no wonder why many SEO will not shake your hand unless there is money in it.

Today I want to offer you a fast, free, and easy to understand list of actions you can take right now to improve your search engine ranking in under one hour. I don’t mean an hour per day, an hour per week, or an hour per month … one hour, and that’s it. Then you can go back to doing things you enjoy. I even broke these steps down for you in maximum increments of ten to twenty minutes, but none of them should take you that long to complete. That is, unless you don’t want to take my word for it and you need to do a whole bunch of extra research to see if I just made this all up to trick you.

When the world spoke to you and said “You should have a blog”, you listened. Well, at least hundreds of millions did. Others may take a while to catch on and understand the many good reasons to blog. Overall, blogging has caught on extremely well in the past few years. Companies understand that a good blog with things people want provides a means to reach more potential customers than any other method. It can create a lot of additional sales. In fact, it can create a lot more sales than any sales representative you’ve got … even the very best of them. It can also make closing the sale a lot easier for the whole company, and greatly reduce marketing overhead. The potential customer has already done the research about what you offer, and if they contact you, they are already mostly sold.

This all begs the question of how your blog will come across to those potential customers. If you look at your blog like it is a sales representative, would it be the sleazy representative you hired and later regret the decision; the representative who makes people’s eyelids heavy and need a nap; or the sharp and clever representative who makes up your top percentile of volume producers?

I was on the phone with a new prospective client just yesterday and he brought up the use of meta tags. I immediately felt like a time machine had just sucked me back to the 1990s when search engines gave attention to the meta keywords tag. The topic of the meta keywords tag comes up once in a while, and each time I think to myself “somebody really suckered you bigtime, buddy.” I find it really hard to comprehend how some people imagine that something simple like meta tags will make a real difference in their website ranking in search engines. It is as if they think they have really out-smarted all the technicians over at Google, Yahoo, Bing, and etcetera, with this cool trick called a meta keyword.

Why can’t the meta keywords myth just die? I mean, there was a day when a good SEO could outsmart a search engine with tricky little tactics like this, but how can somebody in 2010 really think that there is such a simple way to outrank billions of other pages vying for search engine rankings? Do these people really think they were the first on the scene and they have uncovered the golden key to the Internet? Come on … anybody smart enough to tie their shoe should be able to reason this out with just one little “duh, I guess this kind of makes sense” moment of reality-checking.

I recently visited with a local search engine optimization (SEO) client who did not understand the value of blogging about things outside his local market and having items of global interest on his website. He believed that focusing more on things local to him were of the highest importance. It got me to thinking that a lot of people with a local marketing focus may have similar belief. I want to shed a little light on the subject and explain why globally appealing content can create huge benefits to local search results.

Since I have been in my industry for well over a decade, I sometimes forget to break things down and make them really simple for those who are less familiar with my work. That is what I want to do today. I will try to make this easy to understand.

Local Search Marketing Made Easy

I notice a lot of people trying really hard to accomplish local search marketing goals by focusing on website content about local topics. These things have their place, but a common mistake I find is people attempting to tap into the same local resources that all of their competitors are using. It is a sad shame that many of these people are just wasting a lot of time imitating failure.

If you want to know an easier way to improve local search marketing results, try looking outside of your back yard and appeal to people on a broader basis. With a global audience on your side, beating the local competition is easy.