Rome wasn't built in a day - and similarly )if on a somewhat smaller scale!(, building up a successful blog doesn't happen overnight. As with anything, it takes hard work, determination and commitment to get a blog on its feet, and even more to build up a readership through earning the trust and respect of your audience. Here are some top tips on how to build up a successful blog for your business.

'Build websites for users, not search engines' is the advice continually propounded by insiders at Google. As SEOs, we're used to looking at websites and analysing how they would be viewed by a search engine. In actual fact, though, there's a fairly big overlap between what's helpful for a user and what's helpful for a search engine, and the user and search engine experiences can often mirror each other.

Running an SEO project smoothly and effectively requires juggling many skills: creativity, proactivity, effective time management and organisation, to name just a few. But I would argue that one of the most important attributes of a successful SEO campaign is communication of knowledge - within an agency, of course, but also )perhaps less obviously( with clients. Many clients have little or no knowledge of SEO, and why should they? That's what we're here for, after all.

Blog comments: quick link building win or spam-tastic black hat method you wouldn't touch with a barge pole? I wanted to find out what the general consensus was on this controversial topic within the SEO world, so I set out on something of a fact-finding mission to attempt to answer one question: does blog commenting work, and if so, can it be done in a white hat way? )Ok, I guess that's two questions then.

* Has your brand ever considered setting up a forum on its website for visitors? The benefits to a brand of a successful online community can be considerable. It builds visitor loyalty, helps generate inbound links and can let you rank for really niche and long-tail keywords and phrases. If it's successful, a forum can work wonders for a website - but this success depends on it becoming a sociable and useful space. And, among other things, that means no trolls!

Google announced a new tool this week - Verbatim, which is essentially a fast way to find results which exactly match your search queries. This tool replaces the use of the + key in searches when you want to force it to include certain words in the results it brings up. According to Google, this is because: users typed the "+" operator in less than half a percent of all searches, and two thirds of the time, it was used incorrectly. In addition to this,

Ok so the "Top 20,001 takeaways" type posts have already been done, so I wanted to make this more of a general view of the themes emerging from this year's SearchLove conference. I suspect that summarising general trends in what was discussed might be a pretty good reflection of where the SEO industry is now and where it's heading. I'll start off by saying that I enjoyed SearchLove a whole lot more than the other SEO conferences I've been to,

Here at SEOptimise we've been thinking a lot about copywriting recently. More than usual, that is! As the person responsible for overseeing copywriting at SEOptimise, I thought I'd share a few thoughts on the frankly quite lamentable state of what has become known as "SEO copywriting". Any copywriter worth their salt will doubtless share my opinion that so-called "SEO copywriting" gives the world of copywriting a bad name. Despite using the name "copywriting",

In this day and age, it's probably fair to say that we're all aware of the value of Twitter - both on an interpersonal level and in a business context - so I'll spare you the "why everyone should be on Twitter" blurb. Those 'in the know' will know that following the right people is important in terms of reaching out to an appropriate audience - those it will benefit you to interact with and who will share your tweets with their followers.

'There can be no further doubt that it's mainstream. Yes, a discussion around search engine optimisation has featured on never-ending Radio 4 farming-community soap opera The Archers. You're probably wondering why I would know this. The answer is that, being prematurely middle aged enough to refer to the radio as "the wireless", I am also middle aged )and countrified( enough to tune into The Archers from time to time )I don't follow it religiously or anything,

As a self-confessed grammar geek, I'm frequently dismayed by the sloppy standard of writing I am continually confronted with throughout the course of the seven days a week I spend exploring the weird and wonderful world wide web. Whether it's a blog post, a tweet or even a company website, it seems that a lax approach to grammar has become the norm - even, most shockingly of all, among professional copywriters I've hired.

In this week's video blog, Marcus Taylor and Dan Bianchini of SEOptimise debate the pros and cons of personalised search. Who will win the debate? Watch the video to find out! Did you agree with Marcus and Dan's conclusions? Let us know where you stand on the debate by leaving a comment below! © SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter .

You've probably noticed that we've recently given the SEOptimise website and our blog a brand new look. We'd like to hear what you think of it! We'd really appreciate it if you could leave a comment if you have thoughts on any of the following: What do you think of our new website? What kind of posts would you like to see more of on our blog? On-site optimisation tips? Link building ideas? Social media strategies? Useful tools? Lists of resources?

As the importance of SEO becomes increasingly widely recognised, millions more marketers have started churning out press releases. Unfortunately, many seem less concerned about the potential media coverage than about the optimisation benefits. A good press release, when it's picked up on and used by the media, can do wonders for your brand awareness and corporate authority. But it's also great for optimisation, and if your agency is writing slapdash articles,

Image credit: Flickr Despite a tough economic backdrop and widespread fears over delivery times, this was another season of growth for UK online retail. It may seem a little early to be thinking about Christmas again already, but given that careful planning is often hailed as the key to success, what can you start doing now to prepare for next Christmas? In another bumper year for web businesses, more Britons spent more online than ever before. In fact,