Thanks @peterengelhardt-foundercreativebrew for being the first to submit your blog http://www.blog.creativebrew.com.au/ for review on SME. I hope you find my various notes helpful!

Design Notes

The design of the standalone blog is nice. Is it possible to incorporate the same header from your main site onto the blog for more consistency between the two?

Also, have you considered having a wider sidebar on one site only? That would give you more room for your description. I would also consider (if you can’t incorporate the same header & menu from the main site) adding links in the sidebar to the about, services, work, downloads, and contact pages. A first time visitor to your blog might not know how to get to your main website.

As a personal note, I’m not sure if it’s just me (others – feel free to chime in) but I never use date based archives. Just the categories and tags to find specific content.

Social Notes

I would add in the same set of social icons on your homepage onto your blog as well – the blog is currently missing the YouTube and LinkedIn buttons. Also, as a general suggestion, you may want to consider adding the official Twitter follow button (https://twitter.com/about/resources/buttons#follow) and Facebook like button (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/) for your page so you can get followers and fans immediately without them having to leave your website / blog.

If you have a Google+ profile, you might want to add that as a link in your author bio to create Google+ authorship (https://plus.google.com/authorship). This way, you can have your photo show up next to your content in search results – it helps make them stand out more and seems to add a bit of trust factor.

At the bottom of your posts, I notice two sets of social sharing icons – I think the first set stands out best, but if possible, you might want to custom code the tweet button in manually instead of using the plugin. You will lose the analytics Share This offers, but you will gain the ability to customize the button to include your Twitter handle with the tweet of your post & it will also recommend that people who tweet your posts follow which will increase your followers.

Also, depending on the width of the visitor’s browser, the floating Share This widget will overlap the link back to your main site. Having a set of sharing buttons at the top of the post between the title and content and at the bottom of the post should be enough to encourage shares.

SEO Notes

I see that you create good titles, but you don’t use them as the SEO title for your posts. For example, your latest post “Why Branding Matters” uses the SEO title “Just like building a house your business more than ever must look at building strong foundations.” I would suggest using the post title itself because

A) The SEO title is used in search results and optimally needs to be less than 60 characters, otherwise it gets cut off like this:

B) Why Branding Matters is a stronger title and might lead to more clicks from search.

When it comes to meta descriptions, be sure to make them a succinct summary of the post that will make people want to click on your link since the description shows up beneath the post title in search results as shown in the screen capture above. Some posts are ok, but others need to be reworked. The one on the tagline post, for example, would be better as:

Taglines, straplines, slogans… they are key phrases that identify your business by capturing your mission, promise, and brand. Learn how to create a great tagline.

Meta descriptions just need to be 165 characters or less so they don’t get cut off in search.

Also, going back to titles, try to get some good keywords in. You have a post titled “The best way to market your business – video!” I would suggest changing it to target the popular phrase video marketing to say “Video Marketing – The Best Way to Market Your Business”

Content Notes

Content looks pretty good. I would suggest making your posts at least 500+ words. The old SEO standard was a minimum of 300 words per page, but with Google Panda on the lose (the algorithm that dings sites on what it considers low-quality content) it’s better to have more content on your pages than less.

Notes from the Audience

Now I invite everyone here on the SME forums to add your suggestions (or feel free to agree / disagree with mine). Please add constructive feedback and suggestions. This series is to help people improve their blogs, not to have their blogs roasted Comedy Central style.

Design Notes

I agree with Kristi about the date based archives. They’re a bit “passe” and they don’t hold any seo value as anchor text. Categories are more often than not keywords and at the very least descriptive of what content you may find on the other side.

RE: having a separate disign for your blog vs the rest of your site.
Personally I like a seamless look and feel throughout the site, but incorporating a similar look I think is beneficial for the viewer. Consistent looks, fonts and colors can help communicate with the viewer and guide them in their navigation and influence thier eye movement across your page, thus funneling them in the direction you want them to go. Subtle I know, but effective.

I’m also not a big fan of a three column layout. Three columns within a layout can be effective and visually appealing, but your left column is structural and mostly empty space.

Social Notes

I see you are using Facebook OpenGraph. This is great, there are still many blogs that have yet to incorporate this.

I do agree with Kristi on the multiple social share buttons at the bottom of the post. Looks like you have multiple social share plugins running ( I counted 4). Each of these is bringing in it’s own set of javascript files. All together you have 22 external Javascript scripts. Try to get rid of the duplicates and combine any of the others that you can. This will help a bit with page loading times, which is now important to SEO

SEO Notes

I second Kristi’s concern about your Post Title, URL Title, and what is showing up in your tag. They should reflect the same value, url title of course using dashes instead of spaces.

I would also suggest that if and when you change your archive posts to category related posts that you update your url string from it’s current mysite.com/date/post-title to mysite.com/category/post-title
You should only use the h1 tag once per page. Currently you are using it to hold your brew logo as well as your post title.  There have been arguments as to whether or not to even use the h1 tag to hold the logo. I’ve done sites both ways, there are pros and cons to either avenue, but the “only use h1 tag once per page” has a pretty good consensus.  In today’s seo environment I would suggest using it for the post title.

http://blog.creativebrew.com.au/2012/07/03/branding-matters/ 
On the above post I see that visually you have created a nice hierarchical segmentation of your article. You have your title and then some bold text to give a sort of sub heading before you present your content. And you also include a bullet list and an image to further illustrate your point. This looks pretty good, because of your visual cues of large text, bold text, regular text and lists you have broken down your content visually for a human to scan through fairly easily.

BUT what about the search engines indexing your site. You don’t just want to communicate to humans you also want to communicate to search engines.

OK so how do you do this?

Search engines interpret hierarchical segmentation not by visual cues, but by the tags the content is held in.

To do this you would organize your content as follows
H1 tag = Post Title
          Regular text P tag = couple sentence intro to your article.
   Subheading – H2 tag
          Regular text P tag = content that relates to H2 subheading
             Lists are great add one anywhere
   Subheading text H2 tag
          Regular text P tag = content that relates to H2 subheading
       Subheading text H3 tag
          Another great list relateing to H3 subheading

Kristi’s blog executes this type of delivery as well as Famous Bloggers  Both would be good examples to look at. In most modern browsers you can right click on the text to see the html behind the scenes.

One more observation about http://blog.creativebrew.com.au/2012/07/03/branding-matters/

Your graphic http://blog.creativebrew.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Where-are-you.jpg is great, but none of the text can be seen by search engines. The look can be replicated using css alone or if your not proficient using css you could use text for the words and images to illustrate.

Cheers!
Jules

thx — It was a good distraction from 2 current problems I’m attempting to troubleshoot.  

…Sometimes spouting off about something you know is good therapy when your in the middle of searching for a solution to an unrelated issue.

I was going to do a bit of a review as well but your site is coming up with a possible DNS error and direct links are coming up as 404 – perhaps you’re trying to change the permalinks over? 

Do leave a quick note when the site is back up – while it looks to me like Kristi and Jules did an excellent job, more eyes are better than just a few.  

@joseph-pfiffner Yes Joseph, you can submit your blog here: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/clubs/blogging/forum/topic/want-suggestions-to-help-improve-your-blog-sign-up-for-a-free-blog-review/

Great tips. I love the design, it’s nice and simple I don’t think it has to be consistent with your main site design. I don’t like the idea of adding the standard twitter or FB buttons either, that would kill the design, I like the icons you have there. If anything I would be taking more out. Take out the archives, take out that big share button, take out recent posts, take out recommended for you, take out listen to this article unless you have some evidence that people are using it. 

One thing that needs to be clearer is what is the point of this blog? This is something I’m incorporated heavily into my new business. I’ve been looking at the traffic I get to my blog and the conversions are woeful compared to other sources (see this guest post I wrote recently on Think Traffic). You need to think about the type of people who will hit this page. Look at your keywords in Analytics I bet the bulk of your traffic will be long tail keywords that are in some way related to the articles but not that related to your business. For example you don’t rank for ‘creating a great tagline’ but you do rank for ‘short statement about your business’. You are probably getting lots of traffic for keywords like this. 
So anyway the point is, these people might stumble on your page, have fairly low interest, have no idea who you are and have no buying intent at all (at least not yet). So you need to think about how you can engage these people

1. First of all you need to be very clear about what you are and what you can offer them. Here is the design I am playing with for my new blog. Anyone who hits that page is going to exactly what my app does because it stands out and there’s not much else to do on that page other than read the article and sign up. In your case the about text on the right isn’t enough, I had to search for it. Check out Pat Flynn’s site too, a lot of bloggers are following his lead of having a page specifically for first time visitors to explain who you are and what you do.  
2. There needs to be an obvious call to action. Again on my site this is obvious in terms of the colour and the position of the opt in (top right and footer) and in the lack of clutter on the page. I would be giving something away here because people aren’t just going to sign up for the sake of it. Just create a quick ebook or email course ’10 lessons from the world’s biggest brands’ or something and give it away. Unless your content is really exceptional, people won’t be just signing up for emails without incentive. 
3. I would encourage you to mention your company more in your posts. There are 2 reasons for this. 1 is if you aren’t mentioning your company then the reader won’t be generating any interest in what you do and won’t be likely to sign up for anything. Again just re-enforcing point 1. The other reason is generic content is boring. I can read articles on taglines all over the internet. If the tagline article was ‘How I made x company a household name by applying these 10 branding lessons’ it’s much more interesting and it’s unique. On my old blog I used to write about web stuff and SEO, 3 out of the top 5 most popular posts were case studies, the other 2 were in some way controversial. People aren’t interested in generic content.  
4. I’d be trying to build some more activity on your site as well with comments. A few ways to hack this early on (if you don’t have anyone who wants to comment) are join a commenting tribe, set the blog up as do follow and get your self added to lists of do follow blogs (think carefully before doing this), have calls to action in each post asking people to comment, encourage clients to comment (particularly if you offer do follow), install commentluv or disqus (comment love gives people an incentive, disqus means a lot of visitors won’t have to enter their details to comment). But long term if people aren’t commenting then you aren’t doing enough to promote your blog or your content is too boring.