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.

Google and all the other search engines are constantly trying to deliver relevant results to the search queries they receive, they do this on a page by page basis, although sometimes it might not seem that way.

If you want good search engine results it’s your job to help the search engines identify what your pages are about both with the html code of the page as well as the text information on the page.

However, you can start by actually naming the file of your page using you main keyword phase for example:-

EG: www.mysite.com/main-keyword-phrase.html
(Obviously you can’t do this with your main index page)

For those of you that don’t know already, there is a small piece of html code at the top of each page on your website which includes the title of your page and the “meta tags” (description and keywords). The code looks like this:-

<title>Internet Marketing | Marketing Tips Uk</title> 
<meta name="Description" content="Internet Marketing Advice"> 
<meta name="keywords" content="Internet Marketing, Marketing tips,">

The Title Tag:

This is where you name the title of your page. You want to use your main keyword phrase as early as possible within the title tag. This tells the search engine what you claim your page is about. (Ideally you want to match this with the keyword you used in your file name)

Note: do not try and cheat the system, search engines know if you’re trying to tell them your page is about something else other than what it actually is. Also do not key word stuff or continually repeat keywords as they’ll also pick up on this and rank your page very low.

Stick to clear short, relevant and keyword rich titles.

The title tag is also used by many search engines as the link itself in the search engine results. It also appears at the top of the web browser in the blue bar so keep your visitors in mind.

Meta Description:

This is where you can describe what your page is about, again use your main keywords or key word phrases in the description but again don’t go over board.

Keep your visitors in mind, as some search engines will use this description in the search engine results underneath the link to your site.

Meta Keywords:

Gone are the days where this tag actually means anything to the search engines. However, if you abuse it you can still get penalised. It is still good practice to put your main 4-5 keywords or keyword phrases in the keyword tag.

The Header Tags

In your html code there’s    also <h1>, <h2> & <h3> tags.

H1

EG: <h1>Main Headline</h1>    

Anything in between the h1 tags of your html code tells the search engine that this is the Main Headline of your page and is very powerful yet still widely underused.

The example html code above will be displayed on your web page in large bold text

EG: Main Headline

You want to use your main keyword or keyword phrase within in your h1 tag but remember it is important to create compelling headlines that entice your visitor to keep reading whilst still being search engine friendly.

Only use your h1 tag ONCE on each page.

H2

<h2>Sub Headline<h2>

Use in the same way as your headline including your key word and keyword phrases. However, you can use the h2 tag a couple of times. Text will appear slightly smaller than your h1 tag

H3

<h3>Other Headlines</h3>

Again use some other keywords or keyword phrases. You can use the h3 tag a few times throughout your page.

Remember to keep your headlines enticing and informative to your visitors whilst slipping in a keyword or two along the way.

What NOT to do

Do Not key word stuff your header tags, key word stuffing is not useful to your visitors and you will loose sales if your headlines don’t make sense and the search engines will frown upon it.

Do Not put your whole page in your h1 tag, sounds silly I know, but I have seen it done before.

The main Body of your page

Now that you’re clued up on the code side of things there’s also a few things you can do throughout the text on you page to clearly indicate to the search engines what your page is about.

Take your top 3 – 4 main keyword phrases and use them throughout the text on your web page.

You need aprox 6-8% keyword density, in other words for every 100 words on your page your keywords will appear 6 to 8 times, any more than that and you risk your page becoming unreadable by a human and again the search engines will frown upon it.

Once you have your search engine friendly page in place you can go through and emphasize some of your
main keywords by:-

Bolding: <strong>Bolding</strong>
Italics: <em>Italics</em>
Underline: <u>Underline</u>

This will indicate to the search engines that these words are important.

I can’t stress enough, do not try and cheat the system!

Concentrate on creating user friendly pages following the basic rules and you’ll give yourself every chance to climb up the rankings.

As far as I can remember Google or any other search engine has not bought anything from me yet so don’t get caught up with pleasing the search engines if it detracts from convincing your visitors to do business with you.

Jon Stringer
Marketing Tips UK