Blog Management
Your blog is up and running, and well designed. You’re good to go, right? Having a great blog design is important, but you also need to ensure that you are effectively maintaining your blog. How current is the information you provide? How often are you posting content? These are examples of a couple of important questions that refer to the usability of your blog, and effectively determine how well your blog is maintained.
It is ideal that you manage your blog on a regular basis, preferably daily. Why is maintaining your blog so important? Because it affects how you rank in the search engines. For example, if you have links on your website that are broken, this can affect your credibility. Your content is also very important. You never know when someone will visit your website for the first time and want to look at your archive files, or if a regular visitor wants to revisit a previous item.
The Blog Maintenance package that Local SEO Edge offers enables you to manage the following five key aspects of your blog:
Content
Posting content is one of the main tasks associated with a blog, but the amount of maintenance you perform after it is created can increase or decrease the number of visitors. Adding supporting content, such as videos, photos, press releases, and articles is a great way to enhance the quality of your blog. Of course, adding more content will require more frequent maintenance.
Comments
Blogs are a great opportunity for people of like interests to communicate and share their thoughts on a particular topic. Unfortunately, there are many people who use the media as an opportunity to post information that is not relevant to the topic at hand, usually for their own personal benefit. Spam is ugly in any form. It is particularly unpleasant to bloggers because it is a distraction from what is being discussed. Having an excessive amount of spam in your comments can send people far away from your blog. The Local SEO Edge Blog Maintenance package includes assistance with deleting spam.
In the converse, you want to also make sure that you approve and respond to genuine comments in a timely manner. Taking too long to do either can also hinder the success of your blog.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks
Linking to and from other blogs is a way to increase traffic to your site, but it is often overlooked. The main reason is that people are confused about or don’t know how trackbacks/pingbacks work. Essentially, you are alerting another blogger that your blog includes a reference from their site. Such a reference can have an impressive increase in your site traffic. The key to success with trackbacks/pingbacks is to ensure that they are being implemented properly and that you are monitoring any new trackbacks/pingbacks to your blog and adding comments on those sites.
Social Media Integration
In July 2010 Facebook announced that they met an important milestone: 500,000,000 active users. 50% of those users login everyday! There are more than 105,000,000 people who own Twitter accounts. Other forms of social media also report impressive user numbers. These numbers should excite any business owner who is interested in growing their customer base. Your blog is an opportunity to connect with users of social media.
You can integrate social media into your blog by adding common icons and applications. With the Local SEO Edge Social Media Management package you can easily manage your social media and perform important tasks such as ensuring icons correctly point to their destinations and that your social profile passwords are updated with applications.
Wordpress Management/Update Opt-in Code
WordPress is a great blogging tool for local business owners. From time-to-time updates will be made available. You may not need every single update, but you definitely want to monitor the updates just in case something important becomes available (a security fix for example).
WordPress plugins can add a significant amount of functionality to your blog—a feature that should be in your top three blog design must haves. The plugins are typically easy to add, but nowing the latest plugins for SEO and ease of use are very important. At the very least you should ensure that your WordPress plugins are up-to-date. Of course, you want to backup your blog on a regular basis. If after an update you decide it is not for you, you can return to the state of your blog before the update.
Local SEO Edge Blog Management package is $199/month
Blog Management plus Package SEO package $519/month
Blog Management plus Social Media Management plus SEO Package $851/month
