Blog your Way to More Traffic
Your business blog is a highly effective way of getting visitors to your business website. It can work wonders as a method of getting through to your customers, and when your blog is used frequently you will find you’re getting more pages on your site indexed very quickly.
Blogging experts always do the following:
- they post regularly
- they plan ahead of time what subjects to blog about
- they are a source of information
- they want to become known as an authority in their field
What is it that makes a Blog so effective?
1. Blog should have an RSS feed and links for Social Bookmarking. These allow others to bookmark, follow and distribute your blog posts, and help to grow your circulation list.
2. More blog posts help to increase the size of your website, helping to add more relevant content and more keywords, which are useful for the search engines.The best bloggers keep their blog up to date (daily, if not weekly), and are are a constant source of new information and content.
3. A blog is a rich source of content. And content is the stuff that Google and the other search engines feed off. The best bloggers exploit the SEO value of all this fresh new content and adopt the same working principles as if it were a page on a normal website.
(Be warned though - don’t, for a minute, get into the habit of blogging for the benefit of Google - that’s a misguided reason for writing your blog and it won’t help to engage your target audience. Your business blog is first and foremost for the benefit of your clients or business associates.)
So how do you optimise the SEO value of a blog?
Blog Title
Put one of your keywords in the title. Search engines give greater weighting to the words in the title. Ensure human eyes can read the title well though.
Keywords:
Keyword research is a funamental of Search Engine Optimisation. Just like normal Search Engine Optimisation, you should do your keyword research. Then identify a small group of keywords (5 or 6) and use them throughout the blog entry. Make sure they are relevant to the blog subject to ensure maximum relevance.
Placing your Keywords:
The search engines give more importance to the first 25 words of the blog post, so insert your chosen keyword(s) at least once here. But make sure you don’t overuse them . A target figure for keyword density would be 1-3%.
Links:
Use your blog post as an opportunity to link to other relevant pages or articles (with the emphasis on relevant). This counts as much for internal linking (to your own website) as to external linking (to other peoples’ websites). It all helps the Googlebot navigate their way around your pages and your website.
Blog Length
It should ideally be around 300-500 words. The main thing is to strike a balance between long posts (which give you a great chance of being indexed for more keywords) and shorter ones (easier for human eyes to read). Users of the internet have attention spans that leave something to be desired!