In addition to writing for their human readers, web writers and bloggers have to consider the digital web crawlers employed by search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask.
Since many would-be readers use search engines to find blog posts, you need to make sure that Google ranks your site highly when those readers search for terms related to your business, and the content you’re writing.
Rather than spend a large proportion of your marketing budget to have a search engine optimisation (SEO) specialist optimize your business’s blog, you might be surprised to hear that you can learn a lot of the fundamentals yourself. This approach could save your organisation a lot of money and improve your CV, as long as you have the motivation and the time.
So here are 5 basic rules to improve the search engine optimisation of your blog.
1. Always Include Search Terms in Your Post’s Title
Unlike humans, who get to see a website's design, branding, fonts, colours and layout, when a search engine visits your website to index website it 'reads' the code directly. Most blogging platforms and content management systems (CMS) are built so that the main headline or title of your blog post is among the first things a search engine reads. This is because they generally assume that the most important words are the ones that appear first in the code. This is why the title of your blog post is the most important consideration in terms of SEO.
The best approach to writing SEO-friendly titles for your blog post is to imagine what keywords your target audience might be using when searching for your organisations services or products. You can then include the keywords from this hypothetical search in your title. Try to get the most important terms to appear in your title as quickly as you can reasonably can, but be careful not to make the title unreadable or confusing to your human readers. Your SEO-friendly title will have been for nothing if your readers decide not to click your keyword heavy, nonsensical title in, say Google's search results, or they're turned off by your posts content, once he or she finds it. It will also count against you if you stuff your titles with keywords, as the search engines have been wise to this practice (known as keyword stuffing) for years now.
2. Search for Your Target Keywords and Check Out the Competition
Following on from the previous tip, now that you've identified your target audience and keywords, try searching Google with your search terms and studing the content of the first few hits to ensure you are on the right track. It's likely that the first few results you find appear at the top of the page because they have a large amount of quality inbound links, but you can also be sure they have great titles and optimised content for you to analyse and learn from. Hunt out small independent blogs that appear high in the results as are more likely to be there on merit, rather than having a huge amount of in-bound links.
3. Link Important Words to Earlier Blog Posts
In general search engines assume that a blog post that has been linked to from other sites has more authority than one that has not. They consider exactly what word or phrase appears within the link to your blog post, so a blog post on web design is going to be more likely to show up higher in searches on the subject if another page links the word “web design” to the post.
You’ll get the most value from external links from sites that search engines already consider to be an authority on your subject, so if a top web design blog links a phrase such as “web design” to your post, you’ll get a huge boost in traffic). You must also consider that search engines consider all incoming links to your post, including those from elsewhere on your site, so be sure to take the time to link important keywords to previous posts on your blog. This approach will help gain credibility and improve your search rank. It will make a big difference, and if you have co-authors on your blog, be sure to encourage them to follow suit. However, do not go over-the-top, it can put human readers off your posts if they're littered with too many links and Google may penalise bloggers that go overboard.
4. Categorise and Tag your Blogs Content
Be sure to apply your posts to categories and apply tags. Tagging helps organise your blog so that both search engines and humans can easily view content they're interested in via links. These category links generally include terms that group content such as “consulting,” “local” or “technology” that reflect the topics and content of the posts.
Google tries to recognise these linked categories and tags and use them to prioritise your blog in its search rankings for those terms. When a visitor follows one of these links they are taken to other posts on your blog (usually a backlog of other posts that have added to the same category), and as mentioned above, linking search terms used by your potential visitors to other pages within your blogs helps your SEO and it's something you control yourself.
Adding pertinent tags to your blog post is a good approach, but be careful. Google and other search engines are wary of blogs that try to trick the system by attempting to associate your content with unrelated topics. You will be penalised in the search rankings if you use so many tags that the web indexing 'bots' suspect that you might be attempting to gain extra traffic.
5. Participate at Related Forums & Blogs
Commenting on other blogs relevant to your industry or niche and including a link back to your own blog via the comments can generate high quality traffic. You can be certain that there are bloggers writing in your target area, so use a tried and trusted technique and become a helpful and proactive participant in forums and blogs that are important in your niche. Over time people will notice that you are offering yourself up to others, and will be more inclined to visit your blog via the link next to your comments to see what you have to offer with your blog. You'll be judged by the quality of your feedback so try to set some dedicated time asside for writing high quality comments, otherwise no one will be inclinced to check you out.
Summary
These 5 tips should get you on your way to creating a more SEO-friendly corporate blog. Do you have any tips to add? Add your ideas for search engine optimisation in the comments below.