Can SEO Exist Beyond Google Personalization?

Speculation in the search industry is rife this week with claims that Google Search Personalization has changed the SEO playing field. But has it really? Or are people freaking out for no good reason? To find out, we’ll look at how it impacts SEO in the negative and positive. But first, let’s have a quick refresher on how Personalized Search works.

What is Personalized Search?

For the past few years, Google has been monitoring what you search for when logged into your Google account and in particular, what sites you click on in the SERPs. If you favor particular sites, Google takes note and customizes future searches to show you more results featuring your favorite sites, more often and in higher positions.

For example, if you like t-shirt shopping online and are a regular visitor to Threadless as a result of logged in Google searches, Google would feature pages from Threadless more in the SERPs you see for t-shirt related search queries than would normally be featured in SERPs shown to others for the same search queries. Likewise, pages from Threadless would be pushed higher up the search results than they would normally be.

Personalized Search has been in place for signed-in users for years, but this month Google rolled out personalized search to users worldwide, whether they are signed in to a Google account or not.

Apart from privacy concerns, the announcement has prompted the inevitable “SEO is dead” claims that always seem to surface whenever Google announce a change to their search functionality.

So let’s take a look at how/why personalization might influence search engine optimization.

Why Personalization DOES Impact SEO:

• If everyone sees different SERPs based on their searching patterns, how can you measure a consistent ranking? How can you reach an audience if their search queries are already *rigged* to show your competitor’s brand?
• On page optimization and link building will no longer have as much influence on your site’s rank for competitive search queries.
• Clients who opt-in to personalization and visit their own sites may have a false impression that their sites are ranking well in the SERPs and cease or refuse SEO services.
• Clients who opt-in to personalization and visit their competitor’s sites may have a false impression that their sites AREN’T ranking well in the SERPs and blame their SEO.
• Companies / brands with more traffic have a better chance to gain new business because searchers will see more impressions of snippets to their sites. This creates branding opportunities via snippets.
• Webmasters will start optimizing more for other search engines like Bing where they can have more of an impact on organic results.
• It will become even more difficult to rank for generic keywords and search phrases (as larger brands will tend to dominate based on market search share), meaning long tail search queries will become much more important in an SEO campaign.
• Search spam should start to be filtered out as very few people will be revisiting spammy pages. That should eventually push more relevant, naturally optimized pages higher up the SERPs, particularly those in competitive industries.
• Fresh content will give sites an advantage because new pages are more likely to stand out to searchers in personalized SERPs. Same goes for real-time content generated by Twitter, Facebook etc. Static sites are going to fall to oblivion.
• Audience targeting and snippet relevancy will become more important when optimizing web pages.
• PPC ads will have to try harder to compete with increasingly brand-biased SERPs.
• PPC will become more popular as people find organic SEO too complex and abandon it.
• Personalization should help normally lower ranked sites to get to the top a little faster via loyal customers and visitors.
• Titles, META descriptions and text snippet optimization will become SEO priorities.
• Top SERP performers will fall down the ranks if their snippets and offerings are not competitive enough, allowing lower ranked sites to take over.
• Manually checking your site rankings, or those of your clients with personalization switched on will result in skewed, inaccurate SERPs.
• Rank checking tools like WebPosition will no longer be accurate. Clients will stop asking for ranking reports (hooray!).
• Some think that Google could be using personalization to monitor user-driven search in order to tweak the PageRank algorithm based on what users actually search for.
• Brand new sites targeting competitive search queries have very little chance of appearing in SERPs customized by personalization, even with SEO.
• If you don’t rank well now for your target search queries, you might slip further and further off the radar as searchers refine their SERPs by clicking on the higher ranked sites.
• If clicking on SERPs begins to impact what users see, hackers may develop malware etc. that automates SERP clicking.

Convinced that SEO is dead yet? Hold your horses. Let’s aim for some perspective here.

Why Personalization DOESN’T Impact SEO:

• Personalization has been in place for some time already – since 2005 in fact.

• The main Google PageRank algorithm still applies, it’s just the delivery of the results that has changed.

• Any SERP emphasis is user-driven rather than algorithm driven and personalization changes only relate to search queries closely aligned to your web history.

• Most non-personalized SERPs are not identical these days anyway. There is evidence of changes even based on the same search query on same PC in the same location a few minutes apart. Different datacenters and Everflux between them mean consistently shifting SERPs.

• SEO isn’t just about SERP ranking. Think usability, keyword selection, conversion design, branding, social media, online reputation management etc.

• Even if a searcher’s favorite brands come up in the SERPs and even if they visit them, they won’t always find what they’re looking for and will keep looking through and clicking other results, leveling the playing field eventually.

• People won’t necessarily visit your site based on rank – if it’s relevant, it will get found.

• Real Time Search and Universal Search are pushing the organic results down the SERPs anyway. Personalization is unlikely to have as big an impact as those factors.

• Personalization will encourage repeat visitors for sites that can attract clicks. In this way, customized SERPs act as a search engine based bookmarklet.

• Web history only lasts for 180 days if you’re not signed in, so unless searchers do multiple related searches and click on results during that time-frame, personalization may not even apply.

• Although they are not revealing the percentage of search results impacted per page by personalization, Google keeps harping on about wanting diversity in the SERPs so they are unlikely to allow personalization to skew your search results too much.

• You can tell if personalized search has influenced the SERPs you’re viewing by the *customizations* link at top right when logged in. You can view the same search without customization to see how the SERPs look to persons who have opted-out of personalization.

• You can switch it off permanently!

Get a Grip, People

Personalization has been in place on Google for over 4 years. This isn’t a new algorithm, it’s simply a new delivery mechanism. It’s important to remember that a large number of Google users are logged in to a Google account of some kind when conducting searches anyway, so they won’t even notice the difference.

The other thing to keep in mind is that personalization is all about relevance and usability. Webmasters have been focused for too long on rankings and trying to crack a spot in the Top 10 search results for their target search terms. Similarly, searchers have been too lazy to look beyond the first page or two of search results. The rollout of personalization hopefully sees relevancy start to influence and drive our search behavior more so than rankings.

In some respects, Google has simply handed users the steering wheel and encouraged us to drive their search engine. So my conclusion is that while personalization does impact SEO, it is not a SEO killer so much as a search rank killer.

Rankings are dead. Long live Relevancy!

6 Website Redesign SEO Secrets Your Developer May Not Know

At the end of the year, many businesses start to think about redesigning their tired old website to breathe some new life into it. You may even be in the midst of a website redesign right now. If so, the first thing is to make sure you hire a design and development company that knows how to build the infrastructure of the website in a search engine crawler–friendly manner.

Beyond that, you need to address a number of additional SEO tactics before you get too deep into your redesign. The reason you need to keep SEO front and center during this time is twofold: so that you do not lose your previous traffic, but also so that you can gain additional targeted search engine visitors when the new site goes live.

Here are 6 SEO redesign secrets your developer may not know...ignore them at your peril!

1. Creating Your SEO'd Site Architecture

Search engines look explicitly at how all your pages are linked together in order to determine their place within the site. Pages that are linked from every other page will be given more weight than those that are only linked from a few others. This is all considered a form of internal link popularity, or in Google language, internal PageRank.

Recommendation: During your redesign, don't bury too deeply within the site any content that was previously bringing targeted search engine traffic. Ensure that any informational content that will be focused on the more competitive keyword phrases (for example, product and service pages) is high up in your site hierarchy.

In addition, all content contained in a specific category should be cross-linked via some sort of sub-navigation within that section.

2. Categorization and Avoiding Duplicate Content

When people are seeking information from a search engine, they usually have a question, a problem, or a need for specific information. The search queries they use at Google and the other engines reflect this. The more ways you can categorize your content for the various target markets you serve, the better.

Recommendation: Be sure that all top-level pages answer the potential searcher's (your potential customers') questions, and that it's clear that your products and services can solve their problem. In addition, you also have to ensure that regardless of how someone found any piece of content on your site, they always end up at the same URL to avoid PageRank splitting and duplicate content issues.

For example, if a specific product can be classified as both a product and a service, it makes sense that it might be listed under both categories. However, the page (URL) that the potential customer eventually lands on, regardless of which category they started in, should always be the same.

3. New Content Management System and Changing URLS

If URLs must change in the redesign due to a new content management system or back-end coding, search engines may take some time to index the new URLs as well as give them the same weighting they gave the previous URLs due to URL age factors.

Recommendation: It's critical to 301-redirect all old URLs to their relative counterpart within the newly designed website. This will pass the link popularity of the old URLs to the new ones quickly, as well as ensure that site visitors don't receive 404-not-found errors.

This will be easier if the new URL naming is similar to the old one, because you can use automated methods. If URLs must change completely with no correlation to the names of the old URLs, and hand-redirects are required, you'll want to at least redirect all the top-level pages, as well as those that you're sure receive keyword traffic from search engines. But, ideally, every URL should be redirected if at all possible.

4. Coding of Navigation Menus

Links contained within the navigation of your website should be coded in a search engine–friendly manner so that they are visible and crawlable. Some DHTML and Flash menus are invisible to search engines, which causes the pages linked within them to not receive the internal link popularity they should receive.

Recommendation: Make sure all navigational menus are coded with CSS that is visible to search engines. In addition, avoid drop-down box links as the main form of navigation (CSS mouseovers are fine). You'll also want to ensure that all content can be reached by hard-coded links – don't force the user to go through any kind of search box menu because those are traditionally search engine unfriendly.

5. Custom HTML Elements

While some level of automation for titles, metas, headers, URLs, and alt attributes for images can be helpful, it's critical that your new website's content management system allow you to create custom descriptions for these as well.

Recommendation: Make sure the content management system has fields for custom title tags, meta descriptions, heading tags, etc. There should be no limit to the number of characters allowed in these fields either, because every page may need a different number of words and characters.

6. Session IDs and Other Tracking Links

It's best not to use session IDs to track visitors, but if your system must use them, you'll only need to feed the "clean" URLs to the search engine spiders – otherwise, they may get caught in an infinite loop, indexing the same content under multiple URLs.

You'll also want to avoid any sort of campaign tracking links appended to URLs because these can split your link popularity by causing your content to be indexed under multiple URLs.

Recommendation: If this type of tracking is inherent in your system, use the canonical link element to maintain one URL for every page of content.

Don't be surprised if your developer isn't happy to receive some of these "secrets." He or she may feel that their authority is being usurped or their creativity is being hindered. Just remember that it's your website that you're paying them to create in a way that will make you the most money possible. Let your developer know up-front that these things are non-negotiable. If they tell you that they can't do any of the above, start looking around for a new developer – ASAP!

While there will always be a few unexpected bugs to work out when your site goes live, you won't have to be afraid of losing your search engine visitors as long as you know what you're doing. We've successfully helped many companies through this transition without any glitches. At the end of the process, there's nothing like the feeling of having your beautiful new website launched. But more than that, there's great comfort in knowing that the people looking for what you provide will continue to be able to easily find you in the search engines.

7 Things You Can Do Now To Cash in On Social Marketing

Seven is a magic number. Why? Because there are seven simple strategies every small business can employ to jump on the social marketing bandwagon. The best part: most require only a moderate investment of time and/or money.

1. Start Blogging - Blogging is old news to many. Not quite the distant past, but still not the future... sort of a Web 1.5. Is blogging what's 'hot' at the moment? Well, no. It certainly doesn't compare with chasing a link from the front page of Digg. But blogging is alive and well! It continues to be a great way to get interactively connected with your customers. 'Dialoguing' is the reason social marketing exists. How much time you invest in your blog is up to you, but you'll get out what you put in. You don't have to drive yourself crazy putting in daily entries, but you should establish a regular schedule for your blog updates. Otherwise, when people check your blog they'll see the same-old/same-old so often that they'll stop visiting your site... which is the whole reason you started the blog! So don't shoot yourself in the foot by creating a blog that's a visitor-repellent rather than a visitor-magnet.

Blogging is not a monologue. Your blog is not the electronic equivalent of Hamlet's soliloquy. Just the opposite! Blogging is about creating conversations and joining others in progress. Take time to read what others in your industry are saying. Get in on the discussion (and get your name out there) by posting your comments on other blogs. It's free, and again, the amount of time you invest can bring some very big returns. The beauty of blog posts is that you'll almost always be encouraged to supply your name and URL when leaving a comment. This is a great way to build visibility and create a springboard to catapult traffic from other blogs to yours.

2. Take and Share Digital Photos - Flickr can be a tremendous marketing tool thanks to its incredibly active photo groups. The time and cost investment are minimal, and you can use Flickr to reach thousands of highly targeted prospects with compelling images of your product.

3. Be The Answer Man (or Woman) at Yahoo Answers - There's one thing you have to provide that no one else does - your expertise. If you're a service-based business, your knowledge is your #1 marketing tool. Yahoo Answers is a great place for you to hammer away at prospects. Imagine being the go-to person that people seek out. That's who you'll be at Yahoo Answers.

There's no better way to share your expertise and make an instant and direct connection with potential customers. I know dozens of marketing pros like me who spent as little as an hour or two each week answering SEO and promotion-oriented questions there. They tell me that they've been able to track big results from even that small investment of time.

4. Get Into the Movie Business - Pictures may be worth a thousand words, but moving pictures are worth their weight in solid gold marketing. Fortunately, good video cameras are cheap these days, and a short video needs little editing/production work in today's "everyone's a filmmaker" environment. And if you've got the creative "chops" to add some sizzle to a video, go for it! Be the next Scorsese, if you can. Fortunately, the software you need to add special effects won't break the bank. The most "viral" videos are usually spontaneous and unproduced... merely "captured" by a videographer. For marketing purposes, however, a produced video is the way to go... and a how-to video featuring your product is a good choice. If the look or location of your business is a selling point, "tour" videos - of a workplace, a restaurant, the homes you sell, the real estate you landscape, etc. - are your best bet.

Marketing videos are finding a home on local search portals like CitySearch. The find-it-in-your-town site announced that local video ads will be added to its listings. YellowPages.com is also exploring the idea of video opportunities.

Upload your videos to a unique page on your website or add them to your blog page. But don't stop there! YouTube is the most obvious - and the most active - sharing destination. And there are so many others. Just nose around the web and you'll find 'em.

5. Don't Wait To Visit StumbleUpon.com - There are many so-called 'discovery' type sites in social marketing. The best-known are Digg, Reddit, and Netscape, but they're also a bit complicated. StumbleUpon requires the lowest time investment. The site's functionality makes it much quicker and easier to join groups related to your industry and add friends from those groups.

Once you've joined and created your lists, you can start to upload "sticky" (appealing to visitors) content and before you know it, other users will "stumble upon" what you've added. That's when the "magic begins". When visitors give your pages good feedback, your content is shown to even more users.

You can't sell your product or service on StumbleUpon. The benefit it offers is increased traffic, which can lead to increased profíts. Those profíts are just a click away because your site is just a click away. Think of StumbleUpon as a way to raise awareness, Blog readership, grow subscribers, etc... all of which ultimately feed into your profit stream.

6. Join Up - A HUGE part of social marketing is detective work. You need to find your customers where they like to hang out. Well, if your customers are like most people on the planet, it's pretty likely that they hang out at Yahoo Groups or Google Groups to share interests and opinions.

Fetch, Marketer! Go get those prospects.

Like Flickr, the groups at Yahoo and Google are organised into interest-based lists. When you join the lists and discussions, you can provide your expertise (there's that word again) and become a trusted member of the community... the person that other people will want to do business with. There's no better outcome to marketing than that!

7. Make Friends, Not Noise - As you explore social marketing opportunities across the web, be sensitive to the rules and regulations posted on various websites. As a member of a social community, it's your obligation to play by the rules... so make sure you know them and follow them! But here's one general rule for using these sites as marketing tools: Don't spam the system. Flickr doesn't want your entire product inventory posted, and they have rules against doing so. But a few high-quality photo submissions that add to the community are fine.

Whatever social marketing you do, make a contribution to the community. Try to add content and comments of value, not an endless spew of "Buy my product" messages. In other words, don't be a leech that's merely there to suck up prospects. Give back a little. Or, better yet, give back a lot! When you do that, you're on the road to social marketing success. (Translation: more money than you'll know what to do with!)

And remember, with social marketing we're not talking about any old traffic. We're talk about platinum, USDA Prime, pre-qualified, eager to do business, trusting, ready and willing prospects who don't think of you as a business... they think of you as a friend.

So be a good friend. Deliver on the promise of quality and service. If you do that, social marketing will make you rích beyond your wildest dreams.

So stop dreaming and start marketing... socially.

9 Hot Tips to Increase Site Conversions

"Site conversion" is a very dry and unexciting way of saying "how to get more profíts from the same amount of website traffic." Isn't that a more upbeat way of expressing it? Who doesn't want to get more profíts from the same number of visitors?

Increasing your conversion rate is a straightforward, even dramatic way of positively impacting your bottom line. It really cannot be emphasized too much that any improvement at all in your conversion rate means additional revenue that is total profít.

Remember this fact when you are told that the way to "make more money" is to invest in more traffic-generating schemes (and dreams, at times). Before you start spending more money to generate additional traffic, you need to do as much as you can with the traffic you are already getting. If you keep the horse ahead of the cart in your planning, you will have an efficient, stable, measurable conversion rate from which you can extrapolate x amount of additional profit from y amount of new-traffic generation.

The following tips are not in any particular order (except for Number 1), and can be modified and reordered to suit your particular situation. Take ownership of the change and improvement, and make sure everyone involved understands the importance of maximizing every revenue source, beginning with the existing ones!

1. Before you can repair or improve something, you have to have a good way of measuring where you are, what you're doing, where you're going, etc. You can sign up for a free Google Analytics account and use other low- and no-cost tools to develop your "analytics" and "metrics" - essentially fancy words that tell you how you're doing with numbers.


2. Create landing pages that are both keyword- and campaign-specific. Try separating any related pay-per-click keywords into smaller and tighter groups, and then create the landing pages for each of those new subgroups. Conversions will almost certainly be better if keywords, advertising approaches and landing pages are thematically related and tightly integrated.


3. Test different headlines and copy writing. This might be the most effective way of quickly showing improvements. Therefore, you need to write compelling copy or find someone else who can do it for you. There is plenty of free advice about this (much of it worth every penny you pay for it), but the importance of copywriting as it affects site conversions cannot possibly be overstated. This is key.


4. It is very important to test your pricing, as it really does make a huge difference in conversions. If your goal is to maximize customer value, then the highest converting price may not actually be the optimal one. In other words, if you raise your price by 50% and only see a 10% reduction in conversions, you will more than compensate for the drop. Going the other direction, if you lower the price 15% and this doubles or triples your ratio, your gain compensates for your price reduction. Test your prices, and test them in both directions.


5. Website load time has become an oft-overlooked item in this age of "broadband everywhere." Load time is critically important in reducing your "bounce rate" on landing pages. There are various online services that will measure your load speed (websiteoptimization.com), and when you know what it is, you can reduce it by compressing images, removing redundant items, optimizing your style sheets (CSS) and HTML code, and so on. The referenced website will also give you advice on other ways to improve your site's load speed.


6. Clearly identify the sales path(s) and discard any points of resistance, or bottlenecks. Even if you have just a single product, there may be a number of different "paths" that lead to a sale. Perhaps you have a landing page to acquire visitor contact data, which then takes them to a sales page, thence to an order page, and so on. Check your metrics and analytics carefully and you should start seeing patterns in how your visitors navigate your site. If you can see when, where and how visitors are leaving the site, you can delete unnecessary steps, enhance the sales copy or the "call to action," insert a few testimonials, emphasize your warranty or something else to capture that business. Do everything you can to keep the sales process simple and straightforward. The less confusing it is, the less resistance visitors will display.


7. Let your praises come from others' lips. Sometimes talking about oneself can sound egotistical, and it has been clearly proven that third-party testimonials boost conversions. In marketing it is called "social proof" when you bring in statements and assessments from others to buttress your message. If you add testimonials - short blurbs, highlighted quotes, letters - to your various landing pages, sales pages and even shopping cart pages, you will almost invariably notice an improvement in your conversion rate.


8. You need to understand the mind of your market, and your customer's experience with your website. Place an order on the site yourself as you step into the mind of a first-time visitor. Identify the hang-ups, inefficiencies and confusing or missing components that hinder your conversions. In concert with step #6 above, you want to identify why you are not converting, so that you can make the necessary improvements, whatever they may be, to improve your ratio.


9. Some people believe passionately in the power of media on landing, sales and order pages to raise conversions considerably. Others are not convinced, and there is not much hard data from controlled studies to consult. You should consider testing this idea yourself. You should try pages both with and without automatic play engaged. The idea is to lower buyer resistance, and if media helps, all the better. Music, motion graphics and video do add life and personality to your website, but there is a "sweet spot" (balancing point) and the fact remains that different age and cultural groups respond differently to the media. You need to make changes here in the context of your site's demographics. You wouldn't put rock music on your page of ladies' perfumes, probably - unless you have a 20-something demographic and it's a signature fragrance from U2 or some other chart-topping band.

Aren't most of these lists called the "top 10" this or that? You can count this tip as a bonus, then: Keep track of everything you do! Nothing "goes without saying" anymore, so you are hereby reminded that all your hard work can go for naught if you do not keep good records of what changes you are making, when, where, why and how. Chart your progress, review it regularly and don't be afraid to make continuing refinements as you move along your strategic path.

Finally, as a "super bonus tip" - use some kind of sales accelerator, "offer intensifier" or other method to move people faster through the sales process. It could be a special "one time" or "limited time" offer, a limited quantity offer or even a "special event" promotion. Research what's going on at other sites in your industry and others, and stay abreast of what seems to be working. Add your creativity to the mix, tailor things to your company's situation and you should start seeing increased conversion rates in short order.

10 easy steps to fresher blog content

Blogging isn't easy, when you get started you can think of hundreds of ideas for great new articles, but as time goes by it can be difficult to find your posting rhythm, and to come up with unique ideas for posts that actually benefit the blogosphere and add value. I've decided to have a think about new and interesting ways of generating the fresh content that your blog so desperately needs. Hopefully these eight ways to generate fresh content for your blog will help you in

1. Frequent Forums

Some of the best ideas for new and fresh content I’ve had come from questions asked on some of the forums I frequent. If you keep an eye on a few forums within your niche, there will be questions popping up that you know the answer to, but haven’t realised that there is a knowledge gap within your readership.

Sometimes it's difficult to take a step back and think "Well I may know how to do X / Y but do my visitors?" Yahoo Answers and LinkedIn Answers are great question resources. They also are beneficial in generating increased traffic if you reference an article you’ve put together that solves someones problem.

2. Keep the old moleskin handy

Sad as it sounds I keep a notepad beside my bed. I always seem to get the best ideas late at night, or early in the morning. I get amazing ideas whilst giving the old pits a scrub in the shower. Must be the aroma of the shower gel or something. Or maybe its because of this.

3. Do post titles first

Write down post titles as they come to you, and then work on fleshing out the content later. I keep a working draft of about twenty posts in Wordpress, then decide which ones I can really write passionately about. Those things will come to you at the most random of times, so it’s important to get them stuck into your drafts as soon as they come to you.

4. Read outside your niche.

It's very easy to get locked into reading only tech blogs if you are a techie, or reading exclusively the things that relate to your chosen industry. Think outside the box, and read some of the thought leaders outside of your comfort zone. You'll find that by doing so, new content ideas will come to you as a result of your eyes being a bit more open.

5. Scour your comments.

If there is a significant feedback generated on your blog, and you have built up a good rapport with visitors, then you will be getting comments. Comments can be as simple as someone saying "Thanks for the article" (cynical Paul recons these are link hunters /spammers most of the time), or they can be much deeper than that. If you find yourself adding a large response to a commenter, that may be a sign of a content gap that you can fill. If you don’t know the answer to someone’s question - link to someone who does.

6. Fill content gaps

I frequently find myself whilst writing a blog post, that concepts crop up which I could explain further in another blog post. Always worthwhile re-reading the bits and bobs you’ve written before and finding how you can expand and improve. The benefit of this will be twofold, firstly your articles will feel more rounded, and secondly your internal linking will be much richer, which leads to deeper site interaction.

7. Newspapers / Magazines / Newsletter

Newspapers and magazines are always a good source of content ideas. If you are writing a blog on a certain topic - e.g. gardening - then flowers monthly is going to highlight some new ideas which would be of interest to your visitors. If you blog about architecture, get a subscription to Architects Journal. You get the picture. Copyblogger has a great article on cosmo headlines.

8. Buzz Monitoring

I've pimped the benefits of buzz monitoring enough in the past, but it still serves a purpose in generating content ideas. With news breaking faster than ever before, its important to get in on buzz monitoring to find out that snippet of information that could turn into a great new post. Tools like twitter can help with this, as mentioned below.

9. Twitter Search

Twitter is a live stream of conversation. Therefore it is a snapshot of what is hot and what is not in the blogosphere. I keep an eye on Twitter Trends to let me see if there are breaking #hashtags which I should be keeping up with, and writing about.

10. Brainstorming - Spider Diagraming

A bit of an old fashioned one here, but if you write down all the tags you currently have within your blog, and connect the lines with related terms, you should be able to see patterns that will connect the tags. Flesh out new connected tags, and then write one article concerning that new tag - Bingo! New content.