As evidenced by a rather un-busy drive to work today, many people are enjoying a nice day off for Good Friday. Not for those of us hard at work behind the PMX walls - churning out content, building links, managing campaigns and all that.

And eating ice cream sandwiches! (Thanks Jeff!)

I’m always a fan of light Friday posts - so I spent some time digging up some cool Easter facts. Or perhaps ‘cool commercial Easter facts’ is a more accurate term. Either way, here you go.

Hope you have a very happy Easter, Passover or whatever holiday you may be celebrating!

Fun Easter Facts

• According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the largest Easter egg ever made stood 25ft tall and weighed 8,968lbs. It was made of chocolate and marshmallow and needed an internal steel frame.
• When chowing down on a chocolate bunny, 76% of us eat the ears first. 5% eat the feet, and 4% the tail. Does anyone just take a big ‘ol first bite out of the stomach or something?
• For Americans, Easter is the 2nd most important candy-eating occasion of the year. Take a guess on what the 1st most important is?
• 16 billion jelly beans are made exclusively for Easter each year - and red jelly beans are a favorite of children.
• We buy more than 700 million marshmallow peeps during the Easter holiday.

One of the biggest questions our customers ask about blogging is “What the heck do I blog about?”

In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve asked myself that a time or two when it was my turn to contribute content to the blog. I recently sat down and started a list of blog topics that I shared with my coworkers for when they need a little help getting the creative juices flowing.

While I wrote these blog topic ideas with the internet marketing and technology industry in mind, I think with a few tweaks they can easily be used across multiple industries.

Not only did I get a nice little blog post out of this task, I just may have started a new resource we can provide clients during blog consulting and development! Two birds, one stone!

Easy Blog Topic Ideas in a Pinch

• The “Expert” post – take your area of expertise and simply write up an interesting, insightful, or useful post about it.
• The “Resource” post – analyze or critique another resourceful post or piece of content (article, infographic, video, etc.)
• The “Review” post – weigh the pros and cons of different technologies or tools you use in your field.
• The “Tech” post – talk about a new gadget you’ve played with or give a heads up about up and coming technology.
• The “List” post – if you’re feeling a little lazy, pick a topic, find 10 – 20 AWESOME resources on it and list them in your post.
• The “SEO” post – talk to the person in charge of your SEO and find out hot keyword topics in your industry. Then write about them.
• The “Interview” post – find an employee or another big wig in your industry and interview them.
• The “Customer Spotlight” post – pick a customer, talk about how awesome they are and throw them a shout out from your team.
• The “Local Phenomena” post – be one of the first to blog about something unusual happening in your area – an earthquake, a weather phenomena, etc.
• The “Holiday” post – if you’re blogging around a holiday, throw some interesting facts together – no lie, my Thanksgiving blog post still consistently ranks and gets traffic around the holidays. (Did you know turkeys can drown if they look up while it rains?)
• The “Personal” post – share something about your life and connect it to a lesson, metaphor or simile to your work or industry. Believe it or not, my 9 month old has taught me a lot about customer service and how to interact with with clients. (No stealsies! I just figured out my next blog post.)

The web is a huge marketplace for promoting and selling your products and services. If you’re not already utilizing the internet to its fullest extent in regards to sales and marketing, you’re missing out and in a huge way! Just having a website can increase sales, grow your customer base, service your current customer base and increase your brand presence and awareness.

Whether or not you’re ready to engage in an in depth internet marketing strategy, there are plenty of free tools available that you can start using today to set goals and plan growth strategies for your site.

The following tools can help you be found on top search engines like Google and Google Maps, especially for local searches that relate to your company. You are able to identify and track specific search trends for relevant keyword or phrases over several months or even years. You can also track and analyze your web traffic, but more importantly, where the traffic comes from and to see what pages are visited the most. You are also able to discover what keywords people are searching for online related to your business while analyzing how many backlinks you obtain. Lastly, you can monitor mentions of your company and how people are talking about your company, both positively and negatively.

So the free tools you ask? Check them out below:

Google Places

With the great emphasis that Google has put on local search, you want to create a free business listing on Google Places so you can engage customers with photos, offers, testimonials, etc.

Google Insights

This tool is a great way to determine if there’s a hot keyword out there that seems to be getting more and more searches. You can compare search volume patterns for keywords related to your business across specific regions, time frames, categories, etc.

Google Analytics

You are able to analyze direct traffic, organic keyword traffic, most popular pages of your site, track goals, and more for free. This is one tool you can’t live without. If you don’t have some sort of analytics tracking installed in your site, how are you able to monitor what’s working and what’s not?

SEMRush

Determine out how much search volume a relevant keyword is getting – or spy on the competition and see what keywords they’re ranking for!

MajesticSEO

Get a cumulative look at how many sites are linking back to yours month over month – or check the same for a competitor! Backlinks are one of the major factors in getting your site ranking for a ton of keywords in the search engines.

Google/Yahoo Alerts

You can sign up to receive weekly, daily or “as it happens” emails from Google and Yahoo whenever someone mentions your brand or products online.

Many of the tools have both free and paid versions. If you’re a beginner, sign up for a free account and determine for yourself if it’s worth paying for the full monty!

I’m not gonna lie - I used to dread the days I dedicated to managing my PPC campaigns in Yahoo Search Marketing. When you’re used to editing campaigns in Adwords Editor, switching to the slow, cumbersome Yahoo Search Marketing interface (whether you use bulk editing or not) is a nightmare.

So needless to say I was pretty excited to get an email a while ago about the new Yahoo Search Marketing Desktop tool.

I just downloaded it today and have only played with it a bit, but so far I’m pretty happy with it. I think what I like most about it is that its layout and interface is pretty similar to AdWords Editor in a lot of ways - unlike MS’s AdCenter Desktop tool, which confused the crap out me at first (and to be honest, still does sometimes).

Editing keyword bids and ad text will certainly be much easier now, allowing me to get more work done for a client per month than I used to be able to. And, I was happy to note, they seem to have features similar to AdWords Editor’s “advanced keyword bid and ad changes,” which I find INCREDIBLY useful and time saving.

BUT - I will reserve further praise until I use it more in depth.

Are Yahoo & Microsoft Teaming Up Against Mac?

Now that Yahoo and Microsoft have formed their “search alliance” I can’t help but wonder what that means for us Mac users. I already know I can’t use AdCenter Desktop on the Mac without setting up parallels or special programs, which I leave up to my tech guys.

And now on the FAQs page about Yahoo’s Desktop Editor, I read “The tool has been officially certified by Yahoo! to work on the Windows platform only. Using the tool on another platform, such as Mac, that is capable of running Adobe AIR applications will work, but issues found will not be supported by Yahoo!.”

So basically you can use it on a Mac (as I have) but there’s no guarantee that something won’t go wrong…and you can’t rely on Yahoo to help you if it does.

Now obviously Microsoft’s not trying to produce Mac compatible downloads…but now Yahoo too? Look’s like their search alliance is against more than just Google….

I will of course, qualify that by saying that I’m not sure if any of Yahoo’s other tools or downloads were built to be Mac compatible - I’m not typically a big fan of Yahoo tools.

Bottom line: Support Macs Yahoo! I don’t care if you’re in bed with Microsoft, Macs need love too!

As promised, here’s Part 2 of my SEO Content Writing series…check out part one here: SEO Content Writing Part 1.

SEO Content Is Under Appreciated…

Typically, most clients don’t understand just how much SEO content can help their rankings. It’s really all about the terms you want to rank for. SEO’d content helps you rank for more long tail terms. And typically, long tail keywords send more relevant traffic to your website. By relevant I mean people who need what you offer and are more likely to convert to leads, sales, etc.

We’ve seen time and time again how many long tail keywords a site can rank well for just by having the right keywords sprinkled throughout their content.

Of course, I’m in NO way saying that SEO’d content is all you need to rank. There are tons of other factors that go into getting your site ranked for various keywords…SEO content writing is just one aspect of it, but an important one when it comes to long tail rankings.

A Few More Tips For SEO Content

I did promise a few additional tips, didn’t I? To get the first few, go back and read my other post (it’s fairly quick and painless, I promise.)

A few other things to keep in mind when writing content for SEO:

• Use your main keywords in your <h1>, <h2> and <h3> tags…and even <h4> if you got ‘em. Google sees this as a headings, and will usually see them first - they hold a bit more emphasis then body text.
• Bold the use of your keywords once or twice through out your copy.
• Include keywords in the file names and alt tags of any images.
• ABOVE ALL: make sure your content is genuinely useful and relevant information - that’s really what Google is looking for!

Cool SEO Content Tools & Resources

When I first started writing optimized content for clients, I used a very cool tool from SEOmoz called Term Target, that would basically give you a letter grade on how well you optimized your content for a chosen keyword. You basically put in the url of your content, enter the keyword you were targeting, and hit the button to run.

Within seconds you get a “grade” and suggestions on how to improve your grade. Once you’ve run this enough times, you basically memorize what your pages should include to get a good grade, but it’s an awesome tool if your still learning the ropes.

As a newbie in the world of web copy (for both SEO and sales/marketing stuff) I lived and breathed CopyBlogger.com. They’ve got a couple great posts about SEO copywriting that really helped me grasp the concept to begin with. While there are other blogs that may have more comprehensive info on the subject, CopyBlogger will always be near and dear to my heart!