Do any of you have a blog that is worth a damn?

[Mikey P]

Most , if not all cleaning site blogs are an insult to the customer if you ask me.

I can assure you that if your blog has actual content and not just crap like this..

Choosing the Best Professional Carpet Cleaners in Norfolk, Chesapeake, Virginia Beach Hampton Roads
Posted by admin on June 25, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Choosing the Best Professional Carpet Cleaners in Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Hampton Roads, Portsmouth, Chesapeake VA, Moyock, Elizabeth City, Nags Head NC North Carolina.
Cleaning your carpet is one of the most complicated and difficult tasks in maintaining a household. You can only do so much with what is available to you like brooms, brushes, and vacuum cleaners. Chemicals can even damage your precious carpets if used without caution. With this in mind, the only option left is to leave it to the experts and hire a professional carpet cleaner. Carpet cleaning in Norfolk is easy as there is numerous carpet cleaning companies around.
What to look for?
Seek information from friends and neighbors regarding carpet cleaning Norfolk companies. With most houses with at least one big carpeted area. Almost everyone is sure to have had some experience in dealing with carpet cleaners. If you can’t find good advice or if there are conflicting interests involved in your search, ask for reviews from the companies available. In Norfolk the better business bureau can help you see the history of a certain carpet cleaner company. A good company always has a list of satisfied employees. Always have prices based on multiple companies and estimates to ensure that you avoid overpricing.
If possible you should also run checks on the company you hire. For example, see training routines, materials such as which cleaners they use, pricing, and personnel. You can never be too careful when it comes to your home and family. Visit their office or if possible see them working on another project to gauge their skill and professionalism. Carpet cleaning Virginia Beach company offices are not hard to find.
During estimates, the cleaners or their representative should be present in your home. It would be hard to have an accurate estimate for the work that needs to be done if they don’t see it first. This may lead to an overpriced or sloppy job because of lack of funds for materials.
Always ask for a contract and sales invoices to make sure that there are no additional fees after the job is finished. A contract should indicate all fees and additional fees on the occasion of new circumstances or other problems that may arise. Scan the document for hidden statements of liabilities and taxes to make sure you don’t pay more than what you have agreed upon.
Carpet cleaning Norfolk need not be a problem, if you have the patience to look and search for a proper carpet cleaning company in your area.

people will read it and tell you how appreciative they are for your efforts


Who wants to show off their efforts at providing real helpful content to your current and future customers?

 

[Desk Jockey]

Big D has 4-5 that will be on the new website but they will deal primarily fire & water damage and insurance companies.

 

[nerdwithme]

I think the problem with maintaining a blog about a specific service is that there is only a finite amount of information out there about carpet cleaning.

If you are going to create a blog for your specific service business, the blog posts have to be about your business. Its great to provide tips and tricks for home owners or other cleaners to read but I don't think that will help you get crazy SEO placement.

What that site is doing is creating keyword saturated content so that when the website is crawled it tries to find relavent information to pair against what people are searching for.

So all that "find a carpet cleaner in this city" language is helping them game the system. Its not providing relevant and useful content. I didn't even read the entire post to pick up on that.

If i had to offer tips on writing blog posts for your business.

1. Obviously write genuine, relavent, useful and informative posts. Talk about any particular job you did, or what you've encountered in the past. Testimonial posts are great. Talk about what problems you encountered and how the home owner was happy. Also, get the home owner to write something short about the work you did and present that in the blog post as well

2. Talk about your equipment and services as you get them, upgrade them or discover new features / ways to leverage those services for your clients.

3. Write blog posts for the future. You don't need to post everything all at once, or be burdened by figuring out what to write next. In the blogging world its good to have 6 months worth of content in advance so that when you have a lul in current info, you have other types of posts you can put on your blog.

4. The blog post you mentioned above is not a good example of good content. As much as 'gaming' the system counts. Having genuine relevant truthful content on your website is the real way to drive SEO. That being said, if you're not a writer (I'm certainly not) It may be useful to hire a company that will take your writing and turn it into a blog post.

5. Don't put bullshit on your website.
--

 

[Mikey P]

I hear--"I read on your blog that you suggest or offer such and such service at least few times per week..

SEO or not , customers love it.

 

[renegade_cowboy]

I usually just put recent reviews for my blog..

http://www.nwgogreenservices.com/

 

[FredC]

haters

http://www.google.com/search?q=carp...&sugexp=chrome,mod=0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

 

[Shorty]

But some people say the nicest things............................




" I have just received my order from you today, Thank you so much. Impeccable service.
Many thanks. I had waited 6 weeks after asking Rob Allen for a quote on some *** stuff only for him to tell me he won’t ship to NZ! "

 

[A-Team]

Hey guys this is my first post on MB and I would firstly like to say thank you for what I have learned from so many of your posts here I hope in time I can be a worth while contributor.

I only have 3 blogs to date over the past 8 months or so. Part of the reason for only 3 blogs is largely to do with the question that you raise. Is it going to be worth a damn?

What is relevant to one is not relevant to another. The main objective for our blogs is to attract new customers to our sites through relevant information that they are seeking to find. Keyword stuffing may get them there but they won't stay there as the tone of the blog is self serving rather than helpful to their needs at that time.

I think the blog I am most proud of is this one "Newcastle has NSW's highest rate of asthma in children" & your carpet can help.

Here's the link http://www.ateamcarpetcleaning.com.au/blog.html

I am aware that posting a link to my website on my first post is not a great thing to do and Ive seen people jumped all over for that in the past but I think they were blatantly advertising. So if you think I'm doing that please ignore it, I'm just a fellow carpet cleaner. Ok I'm moving on.

In this blog I have links to the Health Dept report showing the stats of asthma, the European study on how carpet is better for Asthma than Hard Floors and I have a video from the Carpet & Rug Institute of America aimed at Doctors regarding this fact and I have a Swedish report about carpet & lowered incidence of allergies. This is all tied in with my blog. I came up with a subject of general interest that was relevant to our area tied it to our industry and wrote about it. I took about 2 hours to find the research to make my point but I think it was worth it. I have credited each agency and put links to their sites.

Anyways, I think its worth a damn. But hey I wrote it so I guess I'm a little subjective.

Next subject is the next challenge.

Cheers

Jamie

 

[nerdwithme]

Well, you cannot deny that their methodologies are effective and that they use the *** to push business to their own carpet cleaning business. Every ones gotta eat.

I would be curious if they are using any frowned upon SEO practices.

Also, every time google redoes their ranking algorithm, you never know how you're going to turn out.

 

[FredC]

frowned upon by who? Google? You? Your competitor?...lol

 

[knoxclean]

Here's mine. I try to be more educational based rather than selling.

http://www.knoxclean.com/blog/

 

[Desk Jockey]

You have a great website David, I've always liked it. I like your blog too!

You changed your name here? Did recognize you. I really hate it when people change there name here.

 

[GreenTechAgain]

This is the right idea. It does not have to be just about your services. You can offer all kinds of advice about household maintenance.
How many pages can you add to your website about CCing anyway? A blog offers you the chance to constantly update your site with fresh content.
Also, the more unique traffic that you have to your site will also raise your site's rankings overall.
So if you have several SERVICE | CITY blogs you can also occupy more search slots.
http://greentechcarpetcleaning.com/blog/
http://greentechcarpetcleaning.wordpress.com/
http://www.carpetcleaningpalmharborfl.com/palm_harbor_florida/

Here's mine. I try to be more educational based rather than selling.

http://www.knoxclean.com/blog/

 

[FredC]

A blog offers you the chance to constantly update your site with fresh content.

So why does yours only have old articles from article directories?

 

[Shane Deubell]

Not even going to try and BS, mine are not worth a damn.
Maybe 10% are good at most.

 

[GreenTechAgain]

So why does yours only have old articles from article directories?

The majority are not. The ones that did come from article directories were changed to a large extent.
So for my site at the time of those articles I considered them fresh - regards to my site.
We are not doing it this way anymore regardless. It was brought to my attention that I should not be doing it this way.
There are several other blogs that I did not list.

 

[nerdwithme]

In another thread i posted a guide that SEOMOZ published on the basics of SEO and in that article it talks about keyword spamming. Here is the exceprt

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/myths-and-misconceptions-about-search-engines

Ever see a page that just looks spammy? Perhaps something like:
"Bob's cheap Seattle plumber is the best cheap Seattle plumber for all your plumbing needs. Contact a cheap Seattle plumber before it's too late"

Not surprisingly, a persistent myth in SEO revolves around the concept that keyword density - a mathematical formula that divides the number of words on a page by the number of instances of a given keyword - is used by the search engines for relevancy & ranking calculations.

Despite being proven untrue time and again, this myth has legs. Many SEO tools still feed on the concept that keyword density is an important metric. It's not. Ignore it and use keywords intelligently and with usability in mind. The value from an extra 10 instances of your keyword on the page is far less than earning one good editorial link from a source that doesn't think you're a search spammer

So, articles like the one mentioned by Mike from the other forum don't do anything for SEO. It just makes the article look like spam. That is what i meant about frowned upon SEO practices.

To elaborate more on how silly people can get with keyword stuffing in their content. Read this for a breakdown of how keywords really work.
http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research

If you guys have any questions feel free to chat me up on AIM, the link is in the sidebar under my name.

 

[FredC]

I'm not going to give lessons..(not just cause I'm an asshole)..the fact is it DOES work but its only part of the equation... and there are for far more elegant ways of doing it than the examples posted ..........

and while seomoz has some great stuff......its the last place I go for seo info

 

[nerdwithme]

FredC what issues do you have with SEO MOZ as compared to any other performance tool

 

[highsteam]

Im currently using it for work examples and stuff. I will try to include some DIY tips and things, but i really find a little limited to do a brand new topic everyday about carpet cleaning.

And yes keyword stuffing is not good no more.

 

[FredC]

FredC what issues do you have with SEO MOZ as compared to any other performance tool

Which other performance tools? I'm not going to give you a tool list.............

Issues...very incomplete picture. Take backlinks for example. Just used SEOmoz tool and got 800 backlinks for a domain I manage that is #2 in a market of millions.

My tool discovered over 10K (way over ) and the 1000s of referring domains/IPs

That may not seem important but:

1. If my customers were using the seomoz tool they wouldn't have any idea of the big picture.
2. If I was using it wouldn't give me any idea of what needed to be done to compete in their markets.

add to that to get any real use out of SEOmoz you have to pay $99/month....most won't pay that much to have it done for them and the tools only give them an idea what needs to be done....given that I assume you are speaking as a professional...and those aren't tools I would use as a professional....even though my tools cost is 10x that

 

[EDS]

I don't know if it is worth a dam but here is my blog. I have changed to a week in review style.

 

[Mikey P]

Off to a great start!

 

[FredC]

I don't know if it is worth a dam but here is my blog. I have changed to a week in review style.

nice....nicer if there was a border and more contrast........

 

[Shane Deubell]

Looks great!

I would cut back on the links though and slightly more text, maybe 2 more paragraghs per.
The links maybe 1 link per 300 words or more.

jmo

 

[encapman]

Here's one that I put together relating to commercial carpet care... www.EncapBlog.com




Rick Gelinas
The Encapman

 

[EDS]

Off to a great start!

Thanks!

 

[EDS]

nice....nicer if there was a border and more contrast........

Border around pics? If so I will tell my wife to add. I did those last posts myself and boy did it take me a long time to put the pics from my phone to my computer. LOL Maybe a dark thick black border might bring that contrast in????

 

[EDS]

Looks great!

I would cut back on the links though and slightly more text, maybe 2 more paragraghs per.
The links maybe 1 link per 300 words or more.

jmo

Wrote another post and tried to make it longer with less links. Took your advice a couple months ago about google authorship and it really makes my listing stand out amongst others. If only I was more photogenic...

 

[FredC]

Border around pics? If so I will tell my wife to add. I did those last posts myself and boy did it take me a long time to put the pics from my phone to my computer. LOL Maybe a dark thick black border might bring that contrast in????

border ...the post itself....something to constrain/differentiate it from the surroundings..and other post..especially on larger monitors

contrast..may be less of an issue with the above in place but consider going with a higher contrast between the font and background (within the border mentioned above)...less taxing to read