We should all know by now how important it is to incorporate a blog on your website. Blogs help keep your website up to date with fresh content, which not only engages your audience but also helps to keep Google ranking you higher.
Let’s get to optimising.
1. Find the best keywords to promote. Google Trends is your friend.
Google Trends (formally Google Insights) and Google’s Keyword Tool are fantastic for finding which keywords you want to fit into the titles and content of your blog. Google Keywords will give you variations of keywords, and keyphrases to push. Once you have a decent list of solid keyphrases, you can then filter them further by using Google Trends to compare traffic density. With this information, you will gain better judgement on which keywords to include in your page titles and blogs. (Doesn’t make sense? Too techy?…give us a ring, and we can help).
2. I have my keywords… now what do I write about?
There are two ways to go about this. The first is to find buzzing, trending news, and give your expert opinion on it. For example, when the iPhone 5 came out, we wrote a blog article for one of our clients (an IT support company) on the iPhone 5 and managing expectations. This was relevant as it related to information technology, was very newsworthy, and we knew that people would be doing a lot of iPhone 5 Google related searches. Using newsworthy items in your article can gain you an exceptionally high amount of valuable traffic, thus helping your search engine position.
We also work with a local Solicitor on their SEO, we keep an ear out for any popular and relevant news that crops up in the media. Each month we post an article commenting on the recent events, if you follow this method, what you will notice is that the article will be naturally filled with keyword specific content with a link back to your website.
3. Make the title of your article as close to your search term as possible.
Another option you can use to build your title is once you have found your strategic keywords that you want to rank for, and you know what the topic of your article will be, then you can name your article. For example, at Rare Form, our primary search term is “web design oxford”. If we were writing an article to specifically promote this keyword, we might name the title of our article ‘How to find the best web design company in Oxford’ or ‘The best qualities of an Oxford web design company’. The objective is to incorporate your search term while maintaining readability and relevance to the article.
4. Format format format. Google will like you for it.
Not only does text formatting make your blog more readable, and easier on the eyes; but search engines acknowledge the use of which formatting tags you use. Let’s start with the H1 tag. It is the king and most important of all of the formatting tags. The H1 is a backend tag in the code of our website that tells Google, ‘hey, this is important!’. (All of the websites that we build at Rare Form have these strategically pre-built in, so you don’t have to worry about the code. But I digress…)
Search engines use the H1 as a huge indicator of whether your webpage is relevant for a search term. Let me stress this next bit…H1 tags should not be abused. Formatting your entire page as an H1 tag is considered extremely bad form, and search engines will punish you. So what do you do for your blog article? Make the title of the article the only H1 tag for that page.
Another little trick is to embolden your keyword search phrases throughout the article. Again, don’t abuse this and make it readable.
5. Promote and evaluate.
You’ve written your article of awesome and sent it into the interwebs for all to read. Do you sit and wait? No…not you! Get out there and get people reading, and give Google more ways to recognise its existence.
Promote. The next step is to give people opportunities to read it. First stop, go to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and any other social media outlets you use, and let people know there is a shiny new blog article for them to read. Do you send out an e-newsletter? Make sure that this article is in the next issue. On the web, making people come back to your site is all about the conversation, so keep it going.
Evaluate. Google analytics is your friend. It will tell you how well your website as a whole is doing, and specific pages. See how this article has done compared to others you have posted. Did it perform better or worse? Most importantly try to find out why it performed the way it did. By comparing it to other articles and campaigns you can tweak your articles in the future to perform at their best.
The nutshell.
Writing a blog for SEO is a game that is half science, and half art. Over time you will find a rhythm that fits your own personal writing style, gets your message across and seamlessly integrates the SEO that you need. Just make sure you integrate our five tips, and you will be shortly on your way to writing blogs with Google juice. Rock n’ roll.
Posted by: Jean Paldan
Oct 12, 2012