Writing a blog used to be thought of more as a tool for casual users writing about food, travel or other pastimes. Blogs were not typically considered as a useful site for posting content about a business. Blog or news pages provide a website location where a company can regularly post updates, case studies about company products or services, industry information, etc.
Today most businesses have a website, if they don’t they should. A website provides a business a place to present a “face” or brand for their business that the whole world can literally see as well as provide details about their company, team, products etc.
Unless a business is in E-commerce where they regularly update an online catalog, most businesses create a static website and then rarely make changes to the site.
Blog or news pages provide a location on the website where a business can regularly create updates that can be posted on the internet. Most people only think about these posts in context of the words and images that a potential customer can view on your site.
Businesses today more than ever rely on their websites to bring potential customers to their physical or virtual location via their website. The process of Search Engine Optimization or SEO helps to optimize websites, content and off page resources. Most people are on the internet looking for something daily and usually are using the search engine Google. Google “crawls” or looks at almost every website, and most pages every few days, then uses their algorithms to create a ranking for specific keywords.
When creating a website today businesses should recognize that what a website visitor sees and what Google sees are two different things. (see below)
This post is not intended to help anyone with their creative writing skills but it is intended to provide some guidelines that will help with creating a post that can help your websites SEO efficiency.
The tips that are being provided here are based on a combination of suggestions by Google along with results of studies made by SEO organizations that research and test various factors.
DO: write quality content, not complex content but quality content
Google does not “read” content exactly but examines and analyzes content according to its algorithms. It is recommended that blog posts should be written at a 7th grade reading level. Quality content is content that people want to read and more complicated content tends to loose readers thus the suggestion to keep the content simple. Obviously this would not apply if your blog is related to some highly technical topic like medicine, engineering, etc.
It is recommended that a blog post be a minimum of 1,000 words in length, longer if possible. In general longer pieces of content are always considered better than shorter pieces, but must be quality informative content.
Bonus Tip: Breaking content into shorter more readable paragraphs is recommended for a better reader experience. Better reader experience keeps visitors on page longer which is a positive search ranking factor.
DON’T: Copy or plagiarize content, do annotate appropriately
Don’t copy content and claim it as your own, Google does not like that and it’s just not cool. However that does not mean you cannot make use of other peoples content. You will see duplicate or copied content all across the internet, news aggregators like Huffpost, ecom sites like Amazon all use content provided by other sites. The important thing is that there is a proper attribution link, think of it as a digital footnote that points back to the site that it was sourced from. Most content writers actually like having their content posted as the attribution link is a backlink that points back to their original content site. More on that later.
DO: Optimize for keywords, DON’T: keyword stuff
Keywords are exactly what they sound like, the words that a website is targeting that customer is searching for. Keyword analysis is a vital part of SEO and website building, while you may feel that a page is very well written with very engaging content, if it does not properly target keywords or phrases that you are hoping to rank for than it won’t show up when potential customers are searching for that keyword.
There are a number of tools that professional SEO’s can use to check a keywords ranking to determine how many searches a month a word gets as well as how competitive it is. It is necessary when a business is developing its website to target appropriate keywords that are not to general and not to specific.
For example, if you are in the car business, you might think that you want to target the keyword cars. However if you search for “cars” you will find that there are over 7 billion search results that show up in Google, on the first page 4 of the 10 results are for the movie Cars along with several listings of national companies.
A better option would be “used cars Tulsa, Oklahoma” or “chevy dealer Tulsa, OK” or “car parts Tulsa Ok” These would be search terms a local business would be more likely to rank for. If your not a local business you might target specific keywords but without the local modifier but more targeted to the industry. These longer keyword phrases is what we call “long tail keywords”.
A word about “keyword stuffing”, this was an older ranking method that is now not only out of date but can actually damage the ranking of your website. Keyword stuffing as it sounds is stuffing your keyword often and throughout a page. Also web developers would use exact match domains where the keyword was in the website URL. Now we look more to use the keywords in title and H1 tags as well as throughout the page. It is recommended that a 1.5% to 2% concentration is as much as you would want to use your keyword in a post. So a 1,000 word blog post might have your keyword or phrase 15 times.
DO: Text and Images
While most blog posts are mainly text, you can certainly add other elements such as images, infographs and videos. Along with breaking up long streams of written content these other items can also provide some SEO benefit as well.
Images should be sized appropriately for the web, and also in a proper format usually jpg. Before you upload an image into a website media file you can add keywords and other meta data that Google can crawl and use as a ranking factor. When you insert an image into a post you can also set image tags as well.
Videos can also be added into a website page or post. This is usually done as an embed, most websites can use various plugins to embed videos either directly or through sites like Youtube.
Bonus Tip: When using images, do not copy any image that you happen to find on a website that you like. For copyright reasons it is best to, if possible take your own pictures, acquire them from online image websites, some are free and some are paid or you can search on Google for images that allow reuse in commercial purposes. The reason for warning there is a company that licenses a huge number of images that appear on the internet. Using specialized software they will search out websites that use those images without authorization and sue them for copyright infringement. Best just to be cautious.
DO: Use backlinks wisely DON’T: Use spammy backlinks
Backlinks are the clickable links that are scattered throughout a website that point the user to another location which could be on that same website, called an internal link or to another website called an external link.
Links are also identified as inbound links or outbound. If I created a website post about fishing and camping and in the post I referenced content on the BassPro website I would create a link that points to that website. That would be considered an outbound link from our page and also an inbound link to BassPro. We want to create only the minimum outbound links we need to document sources that we are using on our website. Links can come in various formats or anchors such as
Branded: Bass Pro Shops
Naked: http://basspro.com
Keyword: fishing
All of which point to the same location. Using any of these variations is acceptable and it’s recommended to use a variety of options rather than just one. Links also are identified as Nofollow and Dofollow but this is a more technical subject for another day.
Inbound links are ideally what we like to get as these are links that other entities put on their website that point back to our website. They are in essence saying this is a good piece of content go look at it.
There is a great deal of debate about the value of links in regard to ranking. A rank from a highly rated website like Google, Microsoft or Ford pointing to your website carries a great deal of value while links from the thousands of foreign directory sites have no value. There is no ideal number or position of backlinks to create a page ranking, the most important thing is for it to appear natural and not “spammy.”
Blog posts are beneficial for backlinking and SEO as you can use a post to target a specific keyword for your business by having that keyword several times in your post. You can also internally link your post to one of your internal pages that may also be associated with your post. Finally you want your post to be identified and linked to by other websites.
Getting website links to your site is the biggest challenge most bloggers face that are doing this for business. While growing traffic naturally is the best way it can be difficult if not impossible for smaller businesses to create the type of content that will get huge following.
This is where the talents of a SEO company can help to advance a business’s website presence through a variety of techniques that help to create a broader web presence.
For more information contact Osiyo Marketing to find out more.
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