Learn how to blog to improve your SEO, both organically and off-site…
According to Search Engine Land author, Jim Yu, blogging is a fantastic SEO tactic and way to produce consistent, valuable content. Indeed, websites can build their brands, increase their traffic, and more through quality writing and consistent posts. Regularly updating a blog with fresh content attracts new visitors while maintaining a loyal fan base, and it improves search rankings. Here are six ways your blog can enhance your SEO:
1) Blogs provide fresh content and improve your SEO.
Search engines seek fresh and up-to-date content, and they use complex algorithms to offer the most relevant content to users. Great websites are dynamic, allowing for constant updates to ensure that the content is relevant while allowing you to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry.
2) Blogs allow you to increase your keywords with appropriate content and context.
Keywords are an often-misused tactic when quantity is emphasized over quality. Companies used to emphasize practices like keyword stuffing, which focused on placing as many keywords as possible in a blog despite how garbled the final copy would be, but modern search engines prioritize content that is actually relevant, articulate, and helpful to readers. When used appropriately, keywords will be strategically placed in the context of relevant content and not over-used.
3) Adding links to your blogs provides credibility while boosting rankings.
Another surefire way to improve your SEO is by adding links to your content. Search engines look for the number of sites linking to your website. There are two types you can add to a blog post that will enhance the user experience and potentially boost search engine rankings:
- Internal links take the user to another page on your site (for example, another blog post about a related topic or a page about a product or service).
- External links take the user to another site, such as someone else’s blog about a related topic or a reference site that explains a concept in greater detail.
4) Linking strategies are best accomplished using anchor text.
Anchor text is the word or set of words people click on to visit your link. Smart bloggers will use meaningful anchor text by incorporating appropriate keywords that are both natural and varied. This in-turn helps link your pages to other related pages and topics, so that when a user searches for the key-phrase that you have linked, they will (hopefully) be directed to the page where that link resides.
5) Blogs integrate with social media marketing.
Many search engines return social media search results as well. If you connect your blog to your social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), you give search engines more to find—increasing your SEO through social media listings. For example, each time we here at Imagine Monkey write a blog, we post it to our Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin pages in order to help reach our target demographic. By posting links to your blog posts via social media, you’re increasing your website’s visibility and helping improve your SEO value.
6) In the world of business writing, content is king.
While there are several ways to incorporate web-based content, blogs have the upper hand in providing fresh, relevant material that’s updated regularly. When paired with an appropriate keyword strategy, internal and external links using anchor text, and social media account integration, blogs have the potential to boost SEO and search engine rankings like nothing else on the web.
Blogs also have the added benefit of building trust in your writing community, which will increase customer engagement and help establish your enterprise as an authoritative voice in your field. With all this in mind, don’t put this crucial task off any longer. Get blogging today! Or find out how an Imagine Monkey web developer can help you grow your online presence.
