Blog posting doesn’t sound like a terribly difficult task on it’s face — you have something you know about and love, and you write about it. Right? Well, to be honest, when you’ve had a blog for several weeks or months and you post on it daily (or even weekly), finding some new angle to write about can be a royal pain in the butt.
Now, wait — what does this have to do with SEO?
Glad you asked. This is one of those times when SEO techniques can help you in your non-SEO exploits. We don’t talk about this much, but it’s good to occasionally branch out a little. So here goes.
You’re probably familiar with backlink analysis tools — there’s a few popular ones out there. SEOMoz and SEOBook have good ones. You use them to look at all of the backlinks that are coming into a website. You can use it on your own website, but it’s generally a lot more profitable to use it on your competitor’s sites so that you can mimic their most effective backlinking strategies. They’re great tools for traditional website SEO geeks.
Here’s the trick for all your bloggers out there — you can snag a backlink analysis tool and use it on your competitor’s websites (or your own, in a pinch) and you’ll end up with a huge list of sources. Sites that are like yours, but have information and angles yours don’t.
A quick example. Let’s say you run a website about Victorian-era fashion designers and their most famous sketches. (Hey, it’s a niche market, what do you want?) You’ve been blogging about Charles Frederick Worth and Sons for the past few weeks, and you really need to get out of your rut.
You snag a backlink analysis tool and run it on your own website, looking for anyone who’s linked to you that you didn’t pay to do so. You find a guy at www.TheyHadNoFashionSense.com that’s been blogging about the absurdity of Maison E. Minangoy’s enormous bicep ruffles, and suddenly you realize he’s right! Rut broken, you join in mocking the dead Russian designer and make a new friend in the process.
