Guiding you to your SEO destination
If you’ve heard about the value of maintaining a business blog, and want to start one of your own, the open-ended nature of blogging may have you looking for a plan. Blogging seems to offer too many options to narrow down a precise strategy. If you’ve asked for advice, you may hear very general phrases like, ‘write about what interests you’, or ‘research your passion’. For structure-oriented personality types, it can be frustrating to receive so little direction.
Busy people on a schedule like specifics. Today I’d like to discuss one approach, so that new bloggers have at least a little perspective on one way a blog post can be structured. A business blog can exist for marketing, branding, or SEO purposes. This post focuses on the SEO side, for business owners interested in their keyword ranking online, and how blogs can augment that ranking.
Let’s get into the anatomy of a first blog post. Your readers need to know who you are, where you’re located, why you’re writing, and a little bit of history about your business or your reasons for getting into the industry you’re in.
Each of these pieces of information is important because they establish your company brand & online image to your readership. This post essentially sets the foundation for all posts to come – it gives readers a sense of consistency when future blog posts follow the same general theme. So, if there are unofficial rules of blogging, the first one would be Maintain Consistency. If you’re a horse breeder in Vermont, you should probably avoid making your next post about your grandmother’s stamp collection. Your first post should establish your location, maybe a few details about the culture of Vermont, the motivations you had for getting involved with horses, how long you’ve been breeding horses, and why you love what you do. Images are a great addition to a blog post as well.
So you’ve mastered your first blog post. It may remind you of grade school essays—making sure you had the; who, what, why & when all covered. Now you’ve got to keep the posts coming. How do you find inspiration for content, keep your posts SEO-friendly, and establish a blogging routine? You want to update your blog regularly – this can be a weekly, bimonthly, monthly, or some other time frame. You should just aim for keeping whatever schedule you choose fairly regular, so that Google & other search engines see your blog as active, and relevant to search results. Rule #2: Establish a blogging schedule.
Once you’ve created a blogging schedule that fits your lifestyle, you should make yourself comfortable while you create your post – sink into your favorite armchair and enjoy a cup of tea. If you’re punching out a blog post while answering text messages and paying bills, not only will your elevated stress levels convey themselves in your post, you face the risk of spelling errors or overlooking formatting details such as making sure each of your posts are equipped with “categories” that optimize your primary keywords. Remember that the readership you’re attempting to build will follow your blog posts or check in regularly with your blog because what you write provides them with an escape from their daily routine. The more you can make your blog a place where your imagination & passions come to life, the more your audience will see you as a source of those same qualities for themselves as they read your blog. Don’t worry about being the next great writer of the 21st century; keep in mind how much power a great conversation with a friend can have to energize your day, and try to have that kind of impact on your readers. It’s not eloquence that’s the key – it’s making yourself & your business accessible and relatable. Rule #3: Be yourself.
Once you’ve got your blog mood down, you just need content, and to keep that content compatible with SEO strategies. Any business is like one of those nested Russian dolls – each skillset you master reveals a new layer of skills to learn. Introducing your readership gradually to each new segment of your profession will allow them to vicariously experience the challenges you face & overcome each day. The SEO side of this challenge is to always keep keywords at the forefront of your posts. If your websites top 3 keywords are ‘horses’, ‘horse breeding’ and ‘racing horses’, you need to make sure you are always entering those keywords as categories for every post. Add in additional relevant keywords per post content. Embedding the terms ‘horses’ & ‘horse breeding’ in the content of each blog post as well is probably a pretty simple task for a horse breeder, so if this tactic comes naturally, use it. What you want to avoid is throwing in a sentence with little or no relevance to the rest of the post just to squeeze your 10th keyword into your blog post. Google and other search engines penalize for keyword-stuffing, so just make sure any keywords you include flow naturally with the overall post. That brings us to the last rule of blogging for SEO purposes: keywords are king, but don’t abuse them.
-Julia Brasor
If you are interested in more SEO techniques or would like to hire us to manage your reputation online contact us at: sales@getfoundquick.com or call 857.526.0096.
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Tags:blogging, boston web marketing, SEO, social media optimization, website design
