Having a blog as part of your website is only as valuable as you make it. If you don’t already, please recognize that the blog is your website’s momentum builder. You have the necessary static web pages that give the basic information about your business; these pages have, hopefully, been optimized for search engines, but then that’s it… they’re done. On the other hand, pages that are updated on a regular basis (such as blog pages) are re-analyzed by search engines and newer content ranks higher in search engine results. Therefore, the more you update your blog, the higher your site will appear in search results. But wait… there’s more here than meets the eye!
Want to be even more powerful? Here are some tips to gain an even greater advantage over competitor’s blogs:
- Use your primary keyword in the title of your post. Generally, your blog software creates a unique URL for each individual post that you make based on the post’s title; so, if you title the post “How To Fry An Egg,” it will create a URL like this: www.myblog.com/how-to-fry-an-egg.html While this may be a witty title for something unrelated to actually frying an egg, it won’t get you many visitors. If this were a real post, it should literally be one about frying an egg.
- Use your secondary keywords in the body of your post. Pepper your text with the secondary keywords for which you also want to be ranked and sprinkle in a few relevant links as well; just don’t overdo it, you don’t want to come off as “spammy” to your readers.
- Be spider-friendly. Make sure your side navigation bar and archives link are available on ALL pages of your blog. Update frequently, but…
- “Update Well.” I just made this phrase up: “Update frequently and update well.” This post does not boil down to the obvious, which is the oversimplified concept of the more you post, the better your site will turn up in search engines and the more readers you’ll have. Updating three times per day with irrelevant, untimely and useless content won’t win you any search engine or human fans. They’ll catch on real quick, leave you and never come back. Don’t post for the sake of posting; make it great.
MELANIE’S SPRINGBOARD*: Problogger Discusses SEO for Blogs
*This is my first post for Stone Soup Technology and I’ve made up this little “featurette.” I’m calling Melanie’s Springboard; it will always be a link to take you to more information on the subject that I’ve just written about. It might be another blogger’s post on the topic or some other relevant website that I find interesting.
