Why Blog?

If you care about search engine rankings, you should care about your blog. A business website equipped with a blog has a powerful tool for increasing search engine results.

Google 101 – Relevance and Authority

When someone uses Google to search, Google tries very hard to deliver the most relevant and most authoritative results it can. So you need to think about how to make your website relevant and authoritative in the eyes of Google.

Does your website have content relevant to the searches you want to rank for? Look at the pages and posts in your website (from Google’s perspective, a web page and a blog post are the same – content). In particular, look at the titles of those posts and pages. The titles (and specifically the first 60 characters of them) go a long way towards telling Google what your web pages/posts are about.

The more pages in your website, the more keywords you might be seen as relevant for. Page titles for 100 pages/posts cover a lot more keywords than page titles for 5 pages/posts.

Your page titles should include important keywords relevant to the page or post. Google puts it like this: “create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content. Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it. Make sure …(your titles)… are descriptive and accurate.”

Writing a new blog post is simple, and provides a natural way for you to keep adding new content. Each new post is a new web page in the eyes of Google, and the keywords in each post (and particularly in the title of the post) make your website relevant for different searches.

Is your website authoritative? In Google’s eyes, a link from one website to another is a vote of confidence in the website that is linked to. A website with more links has more authority.

Not all links are equal – a link from a website with a lot of authority (for example, a university website) is worth more than a link from a website with limited authority.

There will be a number of links that naturally occur for you – links from related businesses, business directories or even friends. But beyond that you’ll need to earn links by publishing content that encourages people to link to you.

Interesting, relevant content is what gets linked to. Blog posts have an author – as people tend to relate to people more than they do to things, using your blog lets you reach out to others on the Internet in a more personalised way.

Strategies

Strategy #1: Post about problems your customers face (rank on new keywords)

Write blog posts that talk about problems your customers face and you’ll wind up using a lot of keywords that they will themselves be searching for. And if you help them solve problems (or figure out how to start), they may get interested in what else you can offer them.

While you are doing this, notice the keywords that are appearing in your titles. What if you are selling monster repellant.

Consider these alternative blog post titles: “Avoiding Things You Don’t Like” vs “The Ultimate Purple People Eater Repellent”

If your customers are searching for purple people eater repellent, naturally the second title is likely to be seen as more relevant. Titles that are made up mostly of generic terms don’t help you as much in terms of making you relevant to specific keywords.

If you write a list of the common problems your customers face and start to post regularly on those topics, you should see a gradual increase in the number of search engine visitors.

Strategy #2: build your online network and earn links

If you are already ranking for a keyword, you can increase the number of visitors by improving your ranking. Most research shows that over 80% of clicks go to those on the 1st page of the search engine results. And over 40% go to the first on the list …

Getting ranked – somewhere – is a lot easier than improving your ranking to #1. Once you have ensured you are relevant (relevant page titles, relevant page copy), you need to think about authority. How can you make your website more authoritative overall?

Using your blog to earn more links is a good option. This isn’t easy. You have to write interesting content and find ways to reach out to those who are interested. If you publish great content and the word spreads through strong relationships, you’ll do well. If you are seen to badger people with irrelevant stuff, it won’t go well at all.

You’ll need to think this one through and come up with your own style. A great way to research a topic is simply to read what other bloggers are posting about. Once you get a feel for the subject, starting commenting on their blog posts. And maybe write some blog posts of your own that link out to posts that you particularly enjoy.

Tracking your search engine visits from keywords

Use your Google Analytics account to review how many visits you get from search engines, and which keywords send those visits. Once logged in to Google Analytics, check out Dashboard, Sources of Traffic, Keywords.