Your blog is a proven way of generating traffic to your business website. Not only is it a great communication tool to your target audience, and when your blog is used frequently you will find you’re getting more pages on your site indexed very quickly.
Blogging professionals adopt a set of common guidelines:
- their blog is constantly updated
- they know want they want to talk about
- their mission is to be a giver of useful, relevant information
- they want to become known as an authority in their field
Can a blog really help increase your website traffic?
1. Your Blog should be set up with an RSS feed or Social Bookmark links. Social Bookmarking is another great way of allowing others to follow you and read your latest material.
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. Blogs consist of lots of content. And content is the stuff that Google and the other search engines feed off. Good bloggers exploit the SEO value of all this fresh new content and make sure they follow the same rules as for a page of text on a website.
(Caution though – don’t, at all, fall into the trap of writing purely for the benefit of the search engines – it’s the wrong motivation for writing your blog and it won’t help to engage your target audience. A blog is designed for followers and customers, not the search engines.)
So how do you optimise the SEO value of a blog?
Title:
Use a keyword in the title. Search engines give higher prominance to the words in the title. Ensure that the title reads well.
Choice of Keywords:
Keyword research is a funamental of Search Engine Optimisation. Just like normal Search Engine Optimisation, you should do your keyword research. Then pick a small group of keywords (5 or 6) and use this throughout your blog post. Ensure they are relevant to the blog subject to ensure maximum relevance.
Placement of Keywords:
The search engines give more importance to the first sentence or two of the blog, so place 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 web spiders find their way around your pages and your website.
How long should the blog post be?
The ideal blog post is around 400-500 words. The thing is to strike a balance between long posts (which give more words and more content for the search engines to digest) and shorter ones (easier for human eyes to read). Internet users have notoriously short attention spans.
{ 0 comments… add one now }