Blogging has more benefits than you may be aware of, including the ability to enhance your search rankings.
Blogging has increased by 50% among Fortune 500 companies over the past two years. Why the increase? I can tell you that it’s not because they wanted an additional hobby. From an SEO standpoint, adding additional content to your site can increase crawl frequency, will allow you to infiltrate more keyword verticals and can promote back-links; which translate to enhanced rankings and more traffic for businesses. Combined with SEO strategy, blogging can produce wonderful results.
Here are 5 ways you can tie blogging and SEO into your online strategy today:
1. Host your blog under your own domain
To ensure that your website is reaping the traffic and SEO ranking benefits, it is crucial to have your blog hosted under your own domain name. This means that your blog URL should not be separate from your website’s URL, for example, ‘www.yourdomain.com/blog’ is the ideal format.
2. Leverage Your keywords
While still staying within your industry topics, blogging allows you to penetrate more subjects, and in turn, leverage more keywords and phrases. Without overdoing it, integrate keywords and keyword phrases into the body of your blog that relates to your topic. Leverage these keywords in the headline of your articles and in the title tags and meta descriptions as well.
3. Make your content easy to find
Making your content easier to find is not just important for the web crawlers, but is important to help your users more easily access your content as well. Include additional page links (pagination) at the bottom of your pages (ex. 1,2,3,4) so users can navigate from one page to the next. Also, including categories will help to organize your content, and help both users and bots find your content more easily.
4. Add additional post links
Web crawlers find content by way of links, so the more links you have to your content pages, the more chances they have of finding and indexing them. Including more links to additional posts in your blog articles will increase your blog’s overall crawlability. You can add ‘previous’ and ‘next’ links to your blog, as well as add suggested blog links at the end of your posts.
5. Add sharing buttons
Sharing buttons are a great way to get your content more exposure. Since share buttons are also a ranking signal in the algorithms, they can also help to give your content more authority and possibly increase your content’s ranking in the search engine result pages.
Blogging for SEO can be a great way to boost your existing online efforts, but it is a commitment. Staying active, posting consistently and integrating SEO best practices will help you win in the long run. Have questions about blogging or how to tie it into your SEO strategy? Contact us!
Submitted by Erica Machin, Titan Growth