So you've started a business blog, providing authoritative insights about the latest news and most pressing issues in your industry. With such great content, your blog should be raising your company's profile and generating more customers. That is, of course, if anyone is actually reading it.
The trouble with blogging is that having great content isn't always enough. You also have to keep search engine optimization in mind, and make your blog attractive to the biggest search engines to drive real traffic.
Here are five tips to help you optimize your business blog for search:
1. Conduct keyword research.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make with your business blog is to fail to include appropriate keywords in your posts. Every post is an opportunity to get noticed by search engines for a new set of keywords.
What makes a good keyword? Ideally, your blog posts should focus on long-tail keywords, such as "Sony Cybershot digital camera" or "Barack Obama action figure." Good keywords should generate a small, but well-targeted amount of search traffic, including at least 500 exact match searches each month. They also shouldn't be too common and too competitive with more popular blogs and websites.
Related: 10 Ways to Turn Your Blog into a Lead-Generation Machine
To determine whether a keyword has too much competition, first install a free browser toolbar -- such as SEOBook's SEO for Firefox plugin -- that displays information about each site in the Google results pages whenever you search for your target keyword. Then take a look at the latest Google Top 10 results for your target word or phrase. If you see a lot of highly-ranked sites with many backlinks pointing to each page, your chosen keyword might be too competitive.
2. Build quality backlinks.
Backlinks play a crucial role in search by acting as "votes of confidence" for every page on your website. If you have plenty of high quality, relevant sites linking back to your page, it shows the search engines that your blog is also high quality.
To improve your rank in search engine results, consider making guest posts on relevant sites and participating in industry forums. This can result in links back to your site, which will ultimately boost your search rank.
3. Encourage social sharing.
Social signals, such as the number of times your content is shared on Facebook or the number of links back to your site from Twitter, play a role in how sites are prioritized in search engine results. That means social networking must figure into your blog strategy.
Related: A Six-Step Survival Guide for Search Engine Updates
For maximum impact, maintain an active presence on the social networking sites that are popular with your readers and provide tools on your site to help them share your content. For tips on how to write posts that get noticed and that people want to share, check out Copyblogger's resources on headline formulas.
4. Improve your site structure.
The navigation structure of your business blog plays a critical role in how it is indexed and crawled by the search engines. So, it's vital that you incorporate these best practices:
• Use a "shallow" navigation structure that enables every page to be reached within three clicks.
• Add internal links on every page, referring users to other parts of your site. This improves the user experience by helping expose readers to more content and increases the search engines' ability to reach every page on your site.
• Remove duplicate content from your website. When pages on your site have the same content, there's a risk that search engines will display only one page of such content in their results. To increase the number of pages that show up in the search results, rewrite any duplicate content to make the pages distinct from each other.
5. Think long term.
Following these tips for your business blog will take time. If you haven't paid attention to search engine optimization until now, you aren't going to revise all of your posts to target the best keywords, become a social media butterfly and restructure your website's navigation structure in a single day.
But that's okay. If you make ongoing optimization a long-term priority for your blog, you'll soon see a payoff in the amount of free traffic coming from the search engines.
Related: Why Content Marketing Is King
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Comments:
For the best SEO campaign, one must knows the ultimate benefits as well as how SEO works. With proper knowledge and right strategies SEO campaign so effective in personal branding.
Thanks for sharing this type of valuable tips. this 5 tips are surely useful to all, who interested to create a business blog. thanks once again.
Wow,Very Professional & effective tips to optimize your business blog. I totally agree with this all 5 points.
"To improve your rank in search engine results, consider making guest posts on relevant site…" We're happy to do guest posts on other sites for backlinks. What we really need is guest posts from other writers on our site. As a small company with limited human resources, blogging and tweeting take up a large block of time. Do you have any suggestions as to how we can procure some good guest content?
Well I agree these are good and also I agree it is hard work but will payoff in the long term.
You say that, but that rather takes for granted a certain level of SEO knowledge which a lot of small business owners simply don't have. Add to that a common perception amongst them of SEO being incredibly complex and expensive and they can find themselves left behind by big business spending big money on SEO.
Good advice, I have been doing SEO and social media marketing to improve my business but it's so time consuming that in the end I just had to get help. I chose a company called Magicbuz because they have been doing social media marketing for a few years and they have teams of trained conversationalists who know how to reach out to all different demographic groups. They actually pay for themselves with all the new business they are able to bring in every month.
Wonderful article i read a lot of tips and tricks but this one is look amazing
I suggest four ways in which optimisation can be improved by a publisher + Search engine results pages, on-site optimisation, off-site optimisation and on-page optimisation. + URL optimisation comes under the heading of on-site optimisation and it’s very important. Search engines take URL’s into account. + Website structure should include good URL’s. + In this context that means they should be short, meaningful and not overfilled with keywords
Heck - with how quickly things change online, even veteran marketers need brushing up on basic concepts. Social signals as a ranking factor has been a major shift in the last year, so someone who's been online forever but hasn't read up on how basic principles have changed would be left behind as well.
Glad to hear these tips are working :)
Thanks for reading!
Lee - Very well said on the importance of merging traditional keyword research and social sharing tools. It's tricky to make content engaging for both the search engines and readers, but it's a very powerful combination when done well. (And you're right - this topic could have easily gone 5,000 words or more, but I hope the bullet point version above is useful for people who just want some quick tricks to get started!)
Good tips AJ, I can only imagine how one fits a topic like this into 600-700 words. Regarding keywords and social, I've found the fine art of optimizing for share is a powerful complement to exact match search phrases. When people Retweet a post or share to some other social service, it's important that the text used to auto-fill the sharing form is something that's compelling for social consumption. If it's just keyword focused, that's great for search engines but maybe not as good for people. Using this approach, we get about 55k organic search referrers to our blog every month and nearly as many from social shares/social links. Live long and optimize :)
@twitter-18312191:disqus , This is so true! I sometimes find myself acting like the same people that made me feel belittled when I was first starting out. It seems that no matter what, there are always more newbies out there than veterans. Gary.
Hi AJ Kumar! Nice tips have been suggested. I hope these tips are helpful up to some extent in getting good results in optimization of the business blog. Thanks for sharing.
I found you number 1 for the keywords 'effective seo strategies'. Two things are obvious, you have the keywords in the url and in the title of the page.
Exactly. It's more of a concern with ecommerce sites, that have repetitive sections like "Product Description" and so on, but bloggers should be aware of how content is stored and managed within their sites.
Backlinks are hugely important, and getting them through guest posts has the added benefit of driving up traffic as well. But you're right that it takes time to have these effects add up - there really are no "overnight" successes!
Yeah, site structure still matters, but it's definitely not the only thing that leads to high rankings. Of course, it's pretty easy to set up your site correctly from the start and then focus on other activities that add more value.
Ha ha - good point :) Let me know when you figure out the answer to that one!
Guest posting is great, not just for building links but also for establishing yourself as an authority figure in your industry. Definitely a recommended strategy!
Obvious to people who have been online for a while, but there are plenty of beginners out there as well. Everyone's got to start somewhere!
Aren't the above the obvious when optimizing any blog?
Great advice. This something that definitely needs to be done. I believe that it takes time and effort to create an effective blog. Not to mention, a lot of patience. I just started a blog for my company and it doesn't receive any responses or hardly any readers. www.faceitfigures.com
Definitely a big fan of backlinks! A great way to make sure to get quality sites linking back to your page is through guest blogging. Remember to read others blogs as well and work to build thought leadership. Lauren at Volusion
Hey AJ good stuff - but you forgot one - how to find more time Happy Holidays !
I really like the points "Encourage social sharing" & "Think Long Term"! I don't think "site structure (just assuming on-site SEO!)" is of that importance tthese days in case of helping you in the SERPs! The point has lost its optimum importance these days in regards to SERP - but YES - it still holds some values.
I think backlinks are very important. Usually when I post on someone elses site I see a significant increase of traffic due to my post being published. I also have seen traffic driven form making comments and having images pasted on my blog that are being searched for. Blogging is not really an overnight success so thinking in the long term is crucial in order to stay focused and see the rewards for your contunied progressions. entrepreneurialambitions.com
The structure of many sites will mean a post is actually stored in multiple locations (for example, in its standard post location but also in a 'categories' index of posts or an index of posts by that particular author). You would usually want to set those duplicates to be 'noindex' when the Googlebot crawls the site.
Hi AJ, I would say that point no:3 hasn't entirely been proven. While it may give some boost for those searching in Google real-time, and undoubtedly raise awareness for your blog the actual benefits have been flaky at best as far as I have seen. Chris.
Question regarding Tip 4, and specifically "Remove duplicate content". If one is writing a blog, is it likely that you will write exactly the same post twice? Or have I misunderstood this?