Blogs are excellent marketing tools. They allow you to have conversations with prospective customers, current customers and fans. Basically, they’re like your media centre – you determine what stories you want told and they provide an opportunity to create word of mouth about your brand.
In addition, blogs are a terrific way to increase your site’s search engine optimization (SEO). This is because a blog allows you to generate more pages pointing to your brand and blog pages are well indexed in search.
Here are 5 things you can do to optimize your blog for search.
1. Develop a List of Keywords
Write down keywords that you think your audience would be using to find your blog and blogs with similar types of information. For example, if you write a Canadian book blog, some keywords may be “Canadian fiction”, “Top Canadian books”, “New Canadian books”.
If you have analytics installed, find out what keywords people are using to come to your site.
Take this list and plug it into Google’s Keyword Tool. Google’s Keyword Tool will show you how often terms are being searched for and will give you keyword suggestions for similar terms that you may not have thought of. With this information, you can build on and refine your list.
It’s important to remember to take advantage of long tail keywords. You’ll be more successful at ranking for less popular, more targeted keywords than trying to rank for broader, popular terms. For example, “Canadian fiction” would be very difficult to rank for but something more specific to your blog, say “Canadian west coast historical fiction” may be much easier.
2. Use Your Keywords in Titles, HTML Page Titles and Image ALT Tags
Once you have your list of keywords, start using them in your blog posts; in particular, your post titles, headings and subheadings, tags, HTML page titles and image ALT tags. This lets search engines know that your posts are relevant to searches using those keywords.
Keywords in your HTML page titles is important because this is the text that appears as a title in a browser toolbar and provides a title for a page when it’s added to favourites or history and is also used for search engine results.
Keywords are also important in your image ALT tags because these are used as an alternative text if the image isn’t available or doesn’t load.
Some content management systems (like WordPress) have fields for you to fill in tags, meta titles, and image alt tags for your posts. If your blog doesn’t, talk to your developer about adding them.
3. URLs
Make sure that you blog is using user-friendly URLs. This means using keywords relevant to the page (for example: “www.blog.com/blog-post-title” instead of www.blog.com/23432) Again, this tells search engines what the page is about.
In addition, make sure to use dashes instead of underscores between words because Google understands dashes to be spaces between words.
Note: some content management systems (like WordPress and ExpressionEngine) use the title of your post to create a default URL – another reason to make your titles keyword-rich.
4.Links
Make sure that the links within your posts use keywords. This tells search engines what the links are referring to.
For example in the sentence “Click here to read How to Optimize Your Blog For Search”, “Click here” shouldn’t be the link text. It’s much better to use “How to Optimize Your Blog For Search” as link text because this tells a search engine what you’re linking to – another indication of what your post is about.
5. Write Good Content
Overall, the most important thing you can do to optimize your blog for search is to write blog posts that are informative and useful to your audience. If you write good quality posts, people will read your blog and share your content with their friends. Creating a must-read blog is the most effective tactic for increasing traffic to your site. For tips on content, read, Copywriting Tips For Effective Marketing.
