Road To SEO

Social media has become a huge comm. unity for the online marketer.  And, with it has come new regulations governing testimonial and endorsements of bloggers set by the Federal Trade Commission this month, October 2009.

Many marketers use SEO page structure and blogging as a means in the process.  Regulations must be followed as liability is there and violators of the regulations set forth can be fined up to eleven thousand dollars.

The regulations are aimed towards online consumer protection.  The FTC is looking to regulate blogs, seeing if the blog masters are trading testimonials and favorable reviews for financial incentive/reward.

If you have a blog or are using a blog for your home page SEO, you will and only create creative content about your interests; you are not covered by the new regulations.                                                                             This is not something to be concerned about as it is a more personal blog for visitors to communicate.

If you are using a blog to promote someone else’s services or products there are two requirements which you need to follow:

1. Material connections must be disclosed.  Disclose incentives that your receive for the promotion of the product.
2. Typical results must be disclosed.  Small disclaimers such as “abnormal results” won’t fly.  You must provide a clear picture of what is reasonably expected of your brand or service.

The penalties are stiff, you may be held liable for false, unsubstantiated statement or misleading statements.  That is a lot to be concerned about from the once free world of the blog and for the blogging community.  All home page SEO must be aware as well as bloggers in general.

One can still recruit bloggers to promote their brand or service on other blogs but you must train the person first to assure that statements are true, not misleading and substantiated.

SEO may have become a bit more complicated in the blogging industry. Blogging is just one of the techniques used however.  SEO is much more in-depth                                                                                                    than just the blogging.

Tips for SEO:

SEO doorway page: These are pages built to draw visitors to your website.  They act as doorways to your site and something that many marketers and SEO companies have gotten involved in.  However, they are not a good idea.

1. If the visitor can’t reach the page by the site navigation on the page than it is useless.
2. The visitor does not want to be clicking through to get to what they are looking for.

The SEO doorway page is not effective for generating traffic, even when the experts perform the page.

Other tips for SEO include:

1. Article market as frequently as you can.  Do no less than on a weekly basis and expand on your keywords with each article.
2. Create press releases.
3. Write reviews on your brand
4. Advertise in the forums
5. Advertise through social medias such as Facebook and YouTube.
6. Blog

Definitely don’t give up the blogging, it is effective and it has brought many marketers exposure and a following that they would not have received otherwise.