Part 3g - Blog SEO - Tips for Search Engine Success
Some of the information in this chapter will be "quasi-redundant," since we have already covered an entire chapter on search engine visibility and SEO. But now we are looking at things from a blogging perspective, so I want to revisit the topic of SEO to show you how to blog your way up the search engines!
Search engine visibility is a big part of online marketing. Thus, it's also a big part of blog marketing. The goal of blog SEO (search engine optimization) is to improve your blog's ranking in major search engines, which will also increase your blog's traffic, readership and interaction levels. These are the first steps to blog success and profitability. But it all starts with search engine ranking and visibility.
Fortunately, business blogs have certain characteristics that make them ideal for search engine option / search engine visibility. These characteristics can improve your blog's visibility and traffic levels — key components of blog marketing success.
For one thing, blog's are easy to publish, so you can create a large volume of quality content fairly quickly and easily. This "breadth and depth" of content is a fundamental building block for search engine visibility.
Most business blogs are also, by default, well structured and easy for search engines to crawl through. Blog programs automatically archive content and allow you to categorize your writing into topics and subtopics. These category and archive links give blogs an easy way to access content, even if it's deep within your blog.
So now that you have an SEO chapter under your belt, what specific things can you do to make your blog more visible to search engines, and higher ranking as well? In other words, how do you achieve blog SEO success? That's what we will talk about in this section.
Optimizing the Titles of Your Blog Posts
Search engines will pay a lot of attention to the title element of each web page / blog post. Remember our friend the title element from the SEO chapter? Well, it's important in your blogging as well. But the good news is, your blogging program will make things easier here.
When you create a title for your blog post, the title also becomes the HTML title element of that page. When you are looking at a web page, you'll notice a short title up in the blue bar at the top of your browser window. This is the title element, and search engines use this title to understand more about your page content / blog post.
The title element also appears in search engine results pages (SERPs), above the description and URL for each listing. So in this capacity, the title must be well written, descriptive and enticing. Remember, if your blog appears on a search engine results page, there will be nine other listings on that page as well. So you have a 1-in-10 chance of getting the click-through. Your title will play a big role in that.
Like I said, most blog programs will take the title you assign to each blog post and automatically convert it into the page's title element. So you don't have to think about the web coding side of things. You just write a great title, and the blog program will handle the coding for you.
The rules that applied in our previous discussion of title elements apply here as well. When writing titles for your blog posts, be sure to include whatever key phrases are relevant to that particular blog post. Make your titles enticing to human eyes as well.
Let's pretend I own a company that provides small business consulting services. I'm writing a blog post about startup financing. Here's how I might create a title that helps me with both search engine visibility and reader enticement:
- Startup Financing - 5 Things You Must Know
- A Guide to Startup Financing
- Financing Your Startup - Ten Helpful Tips for Startups
Notice what these three title options have in common. They all feature my key phrase "startup financing" in some way, and the phrase is right up front in the title. This will help increase the search engine ranking of this particular blog post for the phrase "startup financing" — especially if I go on to write 300 - 500 words of keyword-rich content on that subject.
These titles are also written to be enticing for human eyeballs. After all, search engine ranking doesn't matter if people don't click through the search engine listing to the blog. So I've written these titles to suggest some form of value and usefulness. Treat your blog titles like an advertising writer would treat his or her ad headlines. Write them to pull people in!
Optimizing Your Blog Posts for SEO
We begin this lesson with a reminder that readers come first, and search engines second. When posting new content to your blog, strive to create something of value for the reader. Try to create blog posts that are helpful, interesting, entertaining or otherwise engaging. If you do this, half the search engine battle is already won.
When writing your blog content, limit each post to one idea. Blog posts should be easy to read in one sitting. Shorter posts are more eyeball-friendly and will likely help you grow your readership (especially if they're short and engaging). Write as much as you need to, but try to keep it above 100 words (for value) but below 500 words (for brevity).
From a search engine standpoint, it's also better to create a higher number of short posts. Most blog programs save each of your blog posts as a separate page. So if you blog once a day for a year, you'll have 365 pages of web content at the end of that year. That's a lot of keyword-rich content to educate people and search engines alike! If you keep your blog posts relatively short, you'll be more inclined to post on a regular basis, and regular posting is an important part of business blogging success.
Also, be sure that the content of each blog post is a direct extension of the post title (see previous section). Search engines will compare the content of your blog post to the post's title. The two should match. The key phrase in your title should be carried over into the actual blog post.
When you think about it, this should happen automatically. For instance, if you're blogging about a new software product for bankers, a good title might be "Bank Software Tips: What to Ask Before Buying." This title should then match the body content of the blog post. Maybe this blog post would go on to list the top-ten questions to ask before choosing a banking software program. The page's content would be a direct extension of the title. Good for readers and good for search engines!
When writing your blog posts, you should also feature your key phrases toward the top of the post. Ever heard the expression "above the fold"? Newspaper editors use it to describe the placement of important stories within a given issue. These lead stories appear above the newspaper's fold because editors know that's where people will see them, and thus be more inclined to purchase the newspaper.
Internet marketers also use the expression "above the fold." This means your key phrases appear toward the top of the page, whenever possible. Once again, this is for both people and search engines. Search engines consider the words at the top of a web page more important than words on the rest of the page. So by having your key phrase up top, you can increase that page's relevance to search queries. On the human side of things, descriptive and relevant phrases reassure the reader that they're in the right place.
Optimize Your Text Hyperlinks for Blog SEO
You should also integrate your key phrases within text hyperlinks. Text hyperlinks are just what they sound like: hyperlinks in the form of text. Blog programs make it easy to hyperlink text. You simply highlight the text you want linked, click the hyperlink button, and then indicate where the hyperlink should lead (the destination page). As always, the blog program handles the web coding side of things for you.
Search engines like text hyperlinks for several reasons:
- First of all, these hyperlinks are text as opposed to graphics, which means the search engines can read them.
- Second of all, text hyperlinks lead to other pages (usually within the same site), so they help search engines complete their mission of crawling the site.
- Thirdly, search engines consider hyperlink text to be important, since it usually transports the reader to important, relevant information. In other words, hyperlinks help search engines understand what a blog or website is all about.
So how do you optimize text links for search engines? Easy. You simply put your key phrases in them.
For example, let's say you've followed a paragraph with a hyperlink that says learn more. Naturally, the link leads to a page (or another blog post) explaining the paragraph in more detail. Maybe it leads to an article that has just been referenced or summarized.
Simply by integrating your key phrase within the hyperlink, you can improve the destination page's search engine visibility for the phrase. Instead of writing "Learn more," you might write "Learn more about banking software" ... or "Learn more: Buying bank software."
These keyword-rich hyperlinks (along with body copy, titles, and all the rest) will help educate search engines on the overall theme of your blog. These links are also more descriptive to people, because now they know what's on the other end of the link. So we are once more sticking to our philosophy of — say it with me now — "People first, search engines second."
Key Phrase Caution
I've said it before, but it's worth repeating. Don't overdo it with your key phrases. If you create a blog post that's nothing more than a "farm" of key phrases and hyperlinks, the search engines will most likely view it as spam. Your use of key phrases and hyperlinks should be natural.
Readers would also be repelled by such keyword overuse and blatant repetition. Who wants to read a page that repeats the same phrase over and over like a broken record? And remember, it's the reader that matters in the end!
Blog Popular Topics for Maximum Traffic Levels
Generating traffic to your business blog or website is one of the first steps to success with Internet marketing. After all, the more traffic you have, the more products you can sell (or services, subscriptions, advertising, etc.). No matter what your business model might be, you can always benefit from additional web traffic.
Search engine optimization is one of the many ways you can generate this much-needed traffic. But many webmasters make the mistake of only focusing on their top 3 to 5 key phrases when generating website content. This can greatly reduce the amount of traffic you receive, and here's why.
Most business blogs are related to a certain subject. That subject usually relates to the products or services being sold. But there are often many additional (and highly popular) subject areas that can bring qualified traffic to the blog. These "adjacent" topics — and the phrases that describe them — might not be exact matches for the blog's main subject, but they can still bring plenty of valuable traffic to your blog, thus they should be included in your content plan for blog SEO success.
This will be much clearer with a real-world example:
Expanding Content to Address Popular Topics
I have a blog that pertains to home buying. Specifically, it caters to first-time home buyers, offering advice on everything from house hunting to mortgage loans. I get a steady amount of traffic to this blog, but I could always benefit from additional traffic. Who couldn't, right?
While watching the news lately, I've noticed a lot of stories about home foreclosures. Specifically, these news stories talk about home buyers who have to choose "subprime" mortgage loans because of past credit problems. Later down the road, when those adjustable-rate mortgages reset to higher interest rates, the homeowners are overwhelmed. As a result, they become another statistic in the current spike of home foreclosures.
Let me tell you, nothing drives Internet search patterns like the media. There's a reason Paris Hilton is one of the most "Googled" people on the planet — she gets a lot of media coverage! So realizing that subprime mortgages were getting a lot of coverage, I did some research and found that, sure enough, there's a lot of Internet search for those types of phrases.
My home buying blog already ranked well for a variety of mortgage-related phrases. But I didn't have a single article / blog post on there about subprime mortgages. So here I had (A) a blog that ranked well for general mortgage phrases, (B) a lot of Internet search for subprime mortgage phrases, but (C) nothing to connect the dots. This is where blog SEO comes into the picture, in the form of topical content.
So what did I do? I started blogging about subprime mortgages, that's what! I created a tutorial on subprime mortgages and their connection to home foreclosures — sort of a "buyer be warned" kind of thing. I dug deep to make it a worthwhile read, helpful in many regards.
And, of course, I made sure it was highly optimized for various "subprime mortgage" phrases, the ones identified during my key phrase research. I repeated this blog content / SEO process for a couple of weeks, talking about different aspects of subprime mortgage loans (by using my list of key phrases on that subject).
Then I did some basic link-building work to make sure my new blog posts were quickly found and crawled by the major search engines. I did this by expanding a few of the blog posts into full feature article length, and then published them through article distribution websites with links pointing back at the blog (we will cover article publishing later).
Long story short, my blog began climbing the search engine ranks for "subprime mortgage" phrases, and I began to capitalize on all that media-driven search traffic. After only a month's time, my blog was enjoying another 50 - 75 visitors per day, all from subprime-related search queries.
Flipping houses is another area where I've done the same thing. Thanks to TLC and HGTV, everybody wants to get rich quick by buying, renovating and reselling (flipping) investment properties. So I added resources to the home buying website and blog to capitalize on the large number of "house flipping" searches.
That is what I mean by addressing popular topics on your blog. It brings the traffic!
Applying This to Your Business Blog
You can take the process I've outlined above and apply it to your own business blog, just as easily as I did (and possibly with even better results). All you have to do is identify popular topics that are somehow related to your company's products / services, and then build some content around those topics. After that, it's just a matter optimizing those blog posts like you would any other web page.
Keep an eye and ear to the media, and you'll be able to spot certain topics on the rise (just like I did with subprime mortgages and house flipping). What is being talked about on the local news that's relevant to your industry? What's being written about in the newspaper? What topics are being blogged about and appearing all over the web?
Single out the topics that are related to your audience and website, and use them to drive additional traffic to your website and blog.