Upshot – Regularly adding new content to your site through blogging can help get more people to your site. But it’s more complicated than writing a few words on a page. Read on to find out how to optimise your chances of getting read.
You’ve heard about it, you know you should be doing it, but you’re not sure how to go about it? Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short, is all about improving not just the quantity, but also the quality of traffic to your website.
Whether through Google, Bing, Yahoo or any number of other search engines, your primary goal is to have your website rank highly on search engine results pages. This is done by improving your site’s SEO, helping you get more clients.
To improve your website’s SEO you need to understand how search engines work. The most common way search engines gather information from the millions of websites on offer is through web crawlers. ‘Bots’ also known as search engine ‘spiders’ or ‘crawlers’ continuously search the web for new data.
Sites that are seen to have fresh content and valuable information rank highest. That’s where blogs come in. By creating new blogs, you are creating fresh content and by writing about things of interest to your users, you are creating valuable content.
For more detailed information on SEO check out this helpful blog!
The more often you add new content to your site, the more traffic you will receive. Try to update your blog at least twice a week if possible. This will help to get higher ratings on those all important search engines, such as Google.
Make sure your blog is full of relevant and valuable information for prospective readers. Rather than just advertising your products, use your site to write about relevant and useful topics that will interest them. Blogs that have ‘how to’ and ‘useful tips’ are popular. Make sure your information is accurate, up-to-date and easily understood.
Adding images, videos and links to your blog will help with your SEO as well as providing additional information to your readers.
This is relevant to content. To know what to write, you need to know who you are writing for. Do some market research among your existing and target clients to find out what subjects would be of interest to them. Make sure to get regular feedback and often seek ideas about new topics.
When writing your blog use keywords and phrases to give search engine bots more to munch on. Keywords and phrases are the string of words someone might type into a search engine to find content like yours.
When choosing what keywords and phrases to use, put yourself in the head of your client or customer. Ask yourself, what will they be looking for that I have? What important words will they be likely to search for?
Include external links referencing other websites where the reader can get more information on the subject. External links make your blog more informative to bots and rank higher on search engine pages. A key tip here is to set your links to open in a new tab. That way if readers choose to click away from your blog, your blog will still be there in the background for them to easily find again.
Format your blog well. Use small paragraphs with subheadings to break up long amounts of text that could turn your readers away. Heading tags are VERY important as these will be picked up by search engines. Make sure you run your text through a decent spellcheck and grammar program!
There are some useful plugins you can add to help you increase your SEO.
Using images and videos gives the reader something interesting to focus on and helps to break up text. Not everyone can be bothered reading lots of text so a few photos and well written captions can go a long way to get the point across.
Videos are great too for demonstrating a point. There are so many great ‘how to’ videos on platforms such as Youtube and these will add to your count of external links.
Do your own marketing by sharing your blog on all your social media sites including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube and Linkedin. Use hashtags that are relevant to your content to attract new readers. Invite readers to have a look and respond with comments. Make sure you check the feedback and respond to any comments left.
Note: If you are going to allow comments, use a spam filter like CleanTalk or Akismet. Spammers routinely target comment sections.
Update your blogs consistently. As mentioned earlier, twice weekly is a good minimum standard. This is the hard part. What’s even more important is being consistent with your update. Maybe you will commit to posting new blog content each Monday, for example. Choose a timeframe you can commit to and block the time to do it. Nothing looks worse than an out of date blog page.
If regular blog posting is a drag that you can do without, there are expert writers trained in the field that can do the job for you. Contracting a writer will ensure your blog is updated regularly using the tricks of the trade that help to bring you the customers.
Want to know more? Just ask!
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