Archive for January, 2009

What’s the SCOOP?

In responding to a particularly tenacious person pestering me to post something at my personal blog, I laid out some guidelines for sending me pitches and realized it was an acronym.  When pitching a blogger, remember that you want to develop a working relationship.  So, be sure that you have a valid reason for contacting the blogger.  Consider, are you offering a SCOOP?

  1. Supporting a relevant and vital charitable effort?
  2. Cross-promoting the blogger on your (or your client’s) established, respected, popular site and/or with other social media?
  3. Offering something of value to the blogger’s audience?
  4. Offering something of value to the blogger?
  5. Providing relevant and important breaking news?

Of course, the meaning of these things varies from blog to blog.  Something of value may be a product, interview, or exclusive information.

But if you cannot answer yes to any of the above questions, if all you have is a press release about how cool your client’s product is, know that most bloggers will pass; if you keep sending e-mails with nothing of value, your e-mail will go, unread, into trash.

Posted by buzzmommy on January 13th, 2009

Plug and Play SEO

If you are a wordpress blogger looking to boost your SEO, try All-in-One SEO Plugin.

This plugin allows you to enter a title, description and keywords for your blog and for your individual posts and pages. These meta tags factor into how relevant your post appears to a search engine when it lists results and also to readers searching for information.

At #GNO, some bloggers were asking how to use this plugin.

Basic, out of the box usage of this plug-in will improve your blog’s search engine friendliness, with the usual caveat that this is just the surface of SEO, and that SEO is not the end-all-be-all of a successful site.  Google claims not to use meta tags in indexing. Anecdotally, however, I have noticed that good title meta-tags and reversing the post title and blog name have improved both search results and search engine traffic.

screen capture

Click below to see the explanation of how I used All-in-One SEO in this example.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by buzzmommy on January 7th, 2009