We all experience creative droughts. Musicians get it. Writers get it. When you’re updating a blog on a regular basis you’re sure to come to a point where you really don’t know what to write about too.

So, to keep your ideas fresh and your inspiration running high grab a coffee and look over these ideas, let the caffeine run through your blood and you’ll be set for at least another few weeks.

Write Everything Down

“I’ll do it in the morning.” Ring any bells? It’s probably one of the worst things you can do. You’ll either forget to do it or if you do remember the effect most likely won’t be quite the same – and this doesn’t help with the whole ‘getting into the moment’ vibe you need.

Try making a list of things you want to write about and keep it on your phone or something that’s always available to you. When it comes to the actual writing you won’t be stuck for ideas and you can pick and choose what takes your fancy rather than having a last minute ‘stress’.

Read Every Day

Whether it’s the news or a magazine related to your industry, this will always give you ideas on what’s new and what people are interested in.

Think about the issues and how these affect people and look at potential solutions and discuss these.

Socialise Online

Take part in social media conversations with Twitter and Facebook to see what people are talking about in your sector and any problems they are facing. Pick one of these problems or conversations, research it (if you need to) and provide your findings in a blog post.

If one person is having a problem then hundreds or more probably are too and you can direct them straight to your blog post.

There are many other ways you can stay inspired and pull through creative blocks so you can keep you blog up to date so if you have any further ideas please feel free to add them below. Otherwise, it just leaves me to say Happy New Year!

Firstly, what is ‘bounce rate‘? It is the percentage of people that visit your site and leave without viewing any further pages. They literally bounce right off your site back to Google or another site.

There really is no good bounce rate. It depends very much on industry and the type of audience you are attracting and the intentions of your visitors.

For example, an informational site might have a high bounce rate as most people will find the information they want on the page they land on. Also, MOT centres or emergency plumbers or electricians are likely to have a high bounce rate as the client is more likely to call than email, typically speaking.

Pay Per Click landing pages are likely to also have a high bounce rate as are targeted pages, such as blog posts that are designed to answer a question but it doesn’t mean the user didn’t find what they were after if they leave without viewing further pages.

Sites that have a lot of information on different pages that a user is likely to want to read or those that don’t have a prominent phone number may – annoyingly – have a lower bounce rate.

Also a well-optimised site that has focused pages that cover the keyword areas well are also likely to have a higher bounce rate (more annoyingly!) if they give the user all of the information they need on the one page they land on.

Most people would probably normally expect an optimised site to have a lower bounce rate it seems it really isn’t the case. So, what can we learn from this way of looking at things?

If your call-to-actions are prominent enough a high bounce rate isn’t always a bad thing, providing your site is doing what it set out to do; attract business. Bounce rate isn’t the ‘be all and end all’.

Put another way, although a high bounce rate can sometimes be worrying to discover, providing it is contributing towards generating business at acceptable levels the site is obviously working well in terms of achieving its goals and doesn’t necessarily warrant making major changes.

Prominent phone numbers on the site should allow all of your visitors to get in touch with you easily if that was their intention, regardless of whether they bounced or not.

An interesting but very logical angle on something that is so commonly assumed to be a bad reflection of the quality of the site.

Suggestion: If you are still keen to lower your bounce rate, try Google Website Optimizer to A-B test two versions of the site and see which works best? A higher bounce rate that gives the user everything they need on one page or lower bounce rate that pushes the user to navigate around the site to find what they are after?

Building links is an essential part of any SEO’s list of daily tasks. Whether it’s guest blogging, submitting to directories, blog commenting, distributing press releases or contacting industry sites or webmasters – it’s all part of the job and without it the campaign would stall.

But many of my clients ask what they can do to help with the process. Sometimes they just want to see results quicker and other times they just want to be as involved as they can in making their site (and business) succeed.

Obviously any business owner can contact previous or current clients as well as authoritative figures within their industry but there are other ways they can boost their business exposure at the same time as contributing towards the link building campaign.

I’ve listed a few ideas below, some of which may suit some of your own clients that are keen to help with the process:

Write Articles

Obviously these need to be written to a certain standard and cover certain criteria, but once they’ve got that they can really help the campaign. Whether they are submitted to external article directories or are contributions to guest blogging sites, providing they contain a link back within a suitable piece of text they’ll be of benefit.

Family and Friends

Do any of your relatives or friends have their own website or blog? Give them a quick call (it’s more personal) and see if they’ll link to your site. It takes 2 seconds and should be more than happy to help a new business venture for a good friend or relative.

Network

I’ve attended a number of networking meetings in my past and got to know some great business people. Business cards are commonly exchanged but there’s no reason why you can’t use this opportunity to ask for a link to your website to show their support to local business, even if it means providing a link in return.

Help a Charity or Non-Profit Organisation

You probably don’t realise how many non-profit organisations operate within your city or county and can almost guarantee that there’s one that could use your help, however trivial. Whether it’s painting a community centre sports room or contributing to a local magazine, everyone can offer something to help. If you can offer something freely, you can quite easily ask for a link in return – and who is going to say no to such a tiny request when you’ve helped them out for a couple of hours?

Use Video

How much fun would it be to create your own video on something you love and upload it to youtube? If you create a fun and engaging video that people want to share this will attract links like nobody’s business. Make sure you include your business URL in the video somewhere so that if anyone that shares the video and doesn’t give credit with a link you’ll still see benefit.

Those are just some ideas as to how a client can contribute to the link building campaign at very little cost to themselves and could help see their site perform within the search engines much sooner for more competitive phrases. Not only that but these ideas could also boost their local exposure in the offline world too!

You’ve heard it a million times – and if you’ve read many of my posts on the Creare SEO blog, you’ve probably read it a million times too – but a faster site is a more successful site.

Whether you look at it from an SEO, user experience, conversions or from a design perspective a faster site is a far better site and should be on the long list of things to do when a site is being created, optimised or edited.

One of the things you can look at is making sure your stylesheets are well optimised. By this I mean reducing the way the stylesheet is coded and making the file as small and efficient as possible.

Here are some examples of ways you can shrink and optimise your CSS files:

Use shorthand properties

Not optimised: margin-top: 5px; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 10px;

Optimised: margin: 5px 10px 0 10px;

Or

Not optimised: border-width: 5px; border-style: solid; border-color: #FF0000;

Optimised: border:5px solid red;

Compress colours where possible

Not optimised: background-color: #FFFFFF;

Optimised: background-color: #FFF;

Remove unused styles

Remove the last semicolon for each style

Ensure your CSS validates: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

Those are just a few ways you can speed up your site to aid your SEO and user experience on the site as well as reduce bandwidth usage on your server and should be seriously considered when designing and/or optimising a site for SEO or user experience.

There are also some really handy online tools that will do the job for you, optimising the time spent tweaking the site too!

By now, most of us that are involved in SEO to any reasonable level should know that the speed of a site is having an effect on a site’s rankings. Whether it’s the speed of the server, more streamlined code or the use of optimised images it all matters and Google has just confirmed this to us once again by incorporating site speed into Google Analytics.

If releasing a page load analysis tool and adding a sub-section dedicated to site speed within Webmaster Tools wasn’t enough, this is surely a step to make any good SEO pay attention and start looking at everything they can to make a site run as fast and effectively as possible.

In many ways it comes down to user experience. It makes sense that Google rewards sites that provide the best user experience possible and can be measured partly through the speed of a site.

A fast-loading site suggests that the site owner has spent money on a good hosting account or server, has optimised all images and only included them where necessary and has optimised their code to run as streamlined as possible in order to give their visitors what they want quickly and effectively.

Not only that but it also benefits you directly in the way of reducing disk space on your hosting account as well as bandwidth costs which, depending on your host, can be costly if you use more of your allocated ‘allowance’.

Site speed is only available in the new Beta version of Google Analytics and we’re seeing some results trickling in.

So if everything else wasn’t enough to make you want to speed up your site, now is the perfect time to do what you can to help your site perform better within the search engines as well as give your current visitors the best user experience possible while they’re on your site and get the most out of each and every hit.