Blogging To Help Search Engine Ranking

Blogging for Search Engine Optimization

It makes absolute sense to blog to improve your search engine ranking and get traffic to our site. We all know that the more pages we have out there on the Internet the more chance someone will find us. Blogging is one of the best ways to get more traffic to your website.

Here’s the data from HubSpot. Those who blog see:

• 55% more visitors to their website.
• 97% more links to their website - want a higher ranking, get quality links to your site.
• 434% more indexed pages – this is the number of pages that show up in search engines. Just because you have a site doesn’t guarantee it is being indexed (findable). Just because some of your pages are in search engines doesn’t mean all of your pages are.

With that kind of return on investment who wouldnt want to blog and see those kind of results?

Blogging is Not for Everyone

When asking for ideas to improve your search engine ranking you have probably been told time and time again to blog. Well, while “blogging” is suitable for some, it’s not really suitable for others. For example, for me, for this website, writing a blog about what I am doing and where I am going and what kind of day it is outside is really not going to interest my audience. When you are told to blog you are probably being told to “write articles” of interest to your viewers or customers. Time and time again I have been asked, “I don’t know what to blog about?”. This is because you are thinking of blogging as a “diary” rather than as “useful articles” to attract your potential customers.

While the main goal of your blog may be to express your thoughts, talk back to your customers or as a vehicle to promote your product or services, you also need to provide your potential customers with what they want to know! For me, it is writing articles like this. For a children’s party organiser, it may be writing some articles on tips for entertaining your kids on rainy days!

Think this over:

• Do you have content to write about? If you don’t have much to say blogging isn’t a good medium for saying it. Can you come up with content? Are you a good writer or does it take you all day to write a paragraph. For me writing is easy, writing an article takes literally 15 minutes. My return on investment, return on effort is high since it does not take me long. If your talents lie elsewhere then concentrate your efforts there. On the otherhand, most businesses can write useful atricles, try to think of blogging as both a diary as well as useful articles, and choose what suits your business best.
• Can you commit to writing regularly? Google rewards consistency and consistency builds trust with people. If you can’t maintain a blog then it’s probably better not to.
• Do you have the technical background to install and maintain a blog (plugins, features, etc)? Are you computer literate enough? Will you be able to handle your blogging tool?
• Does your website allow you to blog? If you have a static site you will need to think about upgrading your website to allow you to add content. You need a content management system. This will cost money. Will you get your money back with the increase in visitors to your website?
• Would you need help posting on a blog? If you need to hire someone to write your blog for you then is this investment going to be worth it? Do you trust them to write suitable content?

Advantages of Blogging for SEO

Blogs Promote Fresh Content

The main advantage of blogging is the freshness of content that a search engine likes and rewards. Blogs give you an increased presence on major search engines. A well-written, routinely updated blog can enhance your chances of high rankings on search engine. Establishing a frequent pattern of posting pattern means you’ll have the Googlebot coming to your site every few days. Your pages get indexed on google more quickly and create “backdoors” for any potential customers who find them on google. Imagine, a potential customer is browsing for things to do to entertain their children on a cold, wet day, they come across an article your wrote about such a situation, they then start browsing your site after enjoying the article, they realise you do children’s parties, oh it’s the youngest girls birthday next week, what a fantastic idea, a “princess party”……….now where is the phone?

Blogs Offer Low Cost Maintenance and Advertising

Blogs are inexpensive to set up, operate and maintain. To get a content managed website, or have a static site converted to allow you to add content, can cost as little as £300 – one off fee (with FABI Designs anyway!) How much does it cost to keep putting and advert in the local paper. If you placed an advert in the paper every quater, how much is it costing you? How much business do you get from it? Consider the fact that once your blog is built you can keep placing your averts for free, each article is a new advert, which stays in the public domain for ever!

Blogs Help Brand Building

Blogs serve as another channel on which to promote your brand and company. Blogs give you the opportunity to tell your story over and over, they help set you apart from the competition, promoting and building your brand.

Blogs Help With Relational Marketing

Blogs provide a way for you to speak directly, openly and honestly with your customer allowing you to build personal, long-lasting relationships with your customers that foster trust. Blogs are a fantastic PR tool! They can leave comments on your posts too creating a conversational dialog with your customers to further promote trust.

Blogs Improve Links To Your Website

Another advantage of blogging is the fact that people may find your article useful and link back to you, thus giving a vote for your website. Blogs are a source of free one-way links to your site. Google likes one way links and rewards them highly. 

Position You As An Expert

Blogs enable you to articulate your viewpoints, knowledge and expertise on matters pertaining to your industry. If people know you release articles regularly and they find your articles interesting, they may well sign up to your RSS feed and keep coming back to your website. Thats more sales opportunits for you, repeat custom, isn’t that the aim of every business?

Search Engine Optimise Your Blog

You can optimise your blogging too. It’s not all about just writing a useful article or useful content. You need to think carefully about “how” you are writing. Simple SEO basics are called for here. I won’t go into details about the technical aspects of SEO, I will write more articles about this in the future. However, there are a couple of things to be aware of while writing your “blog” page.

• The title of your article should grab attention, while containing keywords too. Think about what your viewers may be searching for. if they are likely to search for entertaining kids on a rainy day – what do you think your article title should be? Most blogging or CMS tools use the title and place it in the important tags that search engines use to rank your page. The title is KEY!
• Blog articles must be well-written and padded with appropriate keywords so that search engine spiders will find them and index them. Remember your keywords in your content. Using the same example as above, your keywords would be, “kids”, “entertainment”, “rainy day”. Make sure you use these words regularly throughout the article. It’s how google identifies what your page is about and assigns relevancy. Be careful not to over use the words though, google will see this as spamming, just write naturally, with regular mentions of the words.

In conclusion, while the main objective of a blog should be to get your message out, don’t forget to take a little time for SEO and you should see your efforts payoff in the search engine results pages. Now there are some great reasons to blog: What are you waiting for?

You may also like to read:

• How To Write Articles For Blogs Or Websites
• How Small Business Owners Can Build a Blog Without Blowing the Business
• Where to Get Links?
• How a Little Blogging Can Make a Big Difference for the Small Business
• Beginners Guide To SEO

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