Blogging SEO Finding Your Audience

Once you’re posting keyword-rich and interesting content on a regular basis on your blog, then it’s time to think about enhancing your blog’s SEO performance.

One way to do this is to aquire and include links to and from other sites. However, this doesn’t simply mean adding spurious and non-relevant links to your blog posts, because search engines reward quality as well as quantity in terms of the other websites that you link to your own website.

Become Popular

Search engines treat links on websites as endorsements of a website’s popularity, so the better and more popular the websites you link to and link to you, the greater your status.

It is important to emphasise that you should work on quality content first, and once you have interesting, relevant information on your blog, you’ll naturally attract links from high quality popular websites.

A Crowded Market?

Depending on your industry, there may be many of your competitors who are blogging on a regular basis. Some of them may have blogs that have been running for many years, however don’t let this put you off. Study what your competitors are doing, and make the effort to offer a lot of free resources and information: the greater the perceived value of your blog.

Once people begin to notice and respect your blog, your popularity is bound to increase – of course, as long as you are consistent.

Publicising Your Blog

There are literally hundreds of directories online to which you can submit your website, and it is worth taking a little time to seek out the ones relevant to your industry.

Once you’ve been running your blog consistently for a while, and have enough content, downloads and other enticing pieces of information on it, write a press release and submit it to your industry’s specialist press, distribute it widely online and announce it to other, relevant, websites.

To widen your audience further, compile articles from blog posts and submit them to a select set of industry-specific websites or online article publishers (remembering to include a link back to your website ot blog.)

Please feel free to leave your questions below

Blogging for Business: Getting Started

A successful blog can do wonders for your business but writing it, raising awareness, and spending time working out what topics you should be covering to make it interesting to your readers is only half the battle

You also need to understand how to ensure it is as visible as possible. Put simply, if you use techniques to make your blog more search engine friendly, your site will receive more visitors. A higher number of visitors to your site means greater awareness of your brand, more prospects and can even push up your direct sales figures.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO isn’t, as some people think, a highly technical skill: good results are generally achieved with a mixture of relevant content and links.

However, in order to achieve the best possible SEO results it’s important to do some research too. Find out what your competitors are doing, and conduct research into what customers are searching for online before they land on these blogs. Once you know what these keywords are, this will help you to create a list of topics that you should cover in terms of content. This will also save you time later on because you’ll have a plan for what to post and when, rather than having to rely on a flash of instant inspiration every time you sit down to write.

Regularity

Once you have started your blog, it’s vital to instill some discipline in terms of frequency of posts. Once a week to begin with is fine, but several times a week is better. There is nothing worse than happening upon a blog that was last updated three years ago: although the reason for the abandonment might be quite genuine – such as a huge upsurge in business – it does look a bit like the business has died, which must naturally be avoided at all costs.

Posts

Once you’ve started writing on a regular basis it’s a good idea to keep the list of topics for your content close to hand as well as the keywords you singled out for inclusion in your posts. However, it is best not to try to write your entry with keywords in mind, as it can make your blog come across as wooden or a bit strained. The best way to ensure your posts read naturally, and are also SEO friendly, is to write your blog entry first and then go back to include keywords within the content.