Business blogging for SEO is simple, yet simple takes practice.
You already know your business blog can be a traffic magnet, but is it attracting the right audience? Simply, are you making your blog posts search-engine friendly?
Most bloggers don’t realise the enormous marketing potential their blogs have. A recent study by blogger.com shows that while 6 in 10 businesses have blogs, two-thirds of those have not been updated for a year! Fresh, relevant content matters, but basic search engine optimisation (SEO) for blog posts is crucial for digital relevancy.
Get both on track and your blog – all your business’s news, opinions and successes – will rise up Google’s rankings. Your business site will rise with it. How?
Here is some great information based on an article from our friends at US internet service OpenVine.
7 simple blog SEO steps
Find the right keywords
Keyword research is essential for on-page optimisation. Sure, when you write something genuinely interesting and useful on a certain topic you’ll have already used good keywords. However, there are many ways to be more targeted. Finding and using the keywords your customers are searching means they will find you in turn.
The Google AdWords Keyword Tool and semrush.com are both great tools for finding the right keywords for your topic. These two services will even spy on your competition’s keyword use.
Deploy the keywords properly
If one keyword is good, you’d think 10 is better. Nope. Being a keyword sniper works much better. Yes, stuffing in lots of keywords used to work. Google got wise to it. And hates it. So, once you have your valuable, relevant keywords, carefully slot them in where they will attract attention and be irresistible bait to search engines.
Here’s where to put your keywords:
- Title
- Headings and subheadings
- Introductory sentence
- Concluding paragraph
- In-text internal links
- Title tags and meta descriptions
Get your pictures talking
Search engines cannot “see” images to figure out what is relevant to a search, instead they read the text attached to the image file. Without this text, your amazing and relevant photos are invisible to a search engine. Whenever you upload a blog photo, be sure to include keywords in the file name and fill out the alternate text field with a brief, keyword-rich description of the photo
Think links
Networks are, by definition, connected. The internet is the biggest network ever to exist. When you mention another blogger or article in your blog post, insert a link to what you’re referencing (like in our intro). Think of it as building a one-way street. Now, you might also get a link back – a two-way street. To Google a dead-end is bad, a one-way street is okay, a two-way street is good, and a busy intersection of many streets better still.
Get readers signed up
Give readers the opportunity to subscribe to your blog. Include prominently placed RSS or feed subscription buttons. Allow readers to subscribe to your posts via email. All these mean your blog followers will be automatically notified when you have a new post, rather than having to remember to periodically check in on your site.
Friends on Facebook, followed on Twitter
Using social media broadens the reach of your posts. While you might be using social media sites to create connections with potential and current customers, you can also promote your blog content on these services.
Too much hassle? Not with a free program like Hootsuite which makes it easy to update all of your social media presences at once. You can even schedule future posts.
To wrap up, when you follow these simple blog SEO steps, your post’s search rankings will lift and you’ll see a bump in web traffic. Higher customer conversion engagement will follow.
Wait! We promised you 7 tips. Here it is…
Call Mash Media on 1300 00 MASH (6274)
There’s a lot more to optimising blog posts than we can fit in one optimised blog post.