Blogging is a great way to expand your business. Blogs help to build you an online community and expand your reach. More importantly, blogging improves your online exposure and creates more leads for your business.
And while there are crucial ways to blog to promote your business, you must remember that your blog should also be used as part of your SEO strategy to drive traffic to your website.
Even if your business site has a unique, interactive blog, little is gained if nobody finds the blog. So, here are the best SEO tips to help your business blog’s audience grow.
1. Choose the right blog platform. Before we get into the details of the SEO tips, you should set up the blog with a good platform. Blogging with a user-friendly platform makes it easy to perform many of the social media functions that will improve your visibility. We recommend WordPress.
2. Host your blog on your own domain. Hosting your blog on a platform’s domain from your primary site is one of the worst mistakes you can make. A blog on your domain attracts links and search rankings.
3. Use your primary key words in your blog domain. Make sure that your blog’s URL contains the primary keywords for SEO purposes.
4. Use your primary key phrase in the title of your posts. It’s nearly impossible to optimize your blog if you aren’t incorporating key phrases in the titles. Many blogs fail to grow a big audience because they have esoteric titles that aren’t search-friendly.
5. Use your secondary keywords in the body of your post. Make sure you create a list of search-friendly buzzwords that are particular to your industry. Use a few of these buzzwords in every post. Don’t repeat the same words over and over again, and find a way to incorporate the words into the blog organically.
6. Manage your RSS feed. RSS is an easily tracked and managed XML-based file structure that allows compatible web systems to read the data. Simply put, your RSS feed will allow you to sync up your blog with your other social media outlets, such as your Facebook page, Twitter account, StumbleUpon, digg, etc. RSS will allow you to reach more people across many different platforms.
7. Link to your homepage. Especially in the early going, make sure every post has at least one hyperlink to the site’s main page. This is an easy, sure-fire way to improve your visibility.
8. Tag and categorize all of your content for the best indexing results. Too often forgotten by beginning bloggers! There are two things you must do here. First, create a search-friendly page title. NOTE: this is not the same thing as the post title. Like the post title, the page title should contain some of those industry buzzwords that search engines love so much. The page titles are usually located in bottom half of the “post page” on your platform. Make sure you find this before you start blogging.
Also, tag and categorize the content. Create a number of categories that all of your posts should be divided into. Some posts will be categorized as more than one. Categorizing is a great way to make your archives easy to navigate, especially when you’ve been blogging for a while. This will allow customers to search all of blog for specific products or industry advice.
9. Leverage podcasts and videos. Podcasts are a simple way to provide more detail and personalization around your business. The MP3 format can easily be streamed for listening on the web and from your blog. You can podcast your files and manage them on iTunes.
Also, you can stream video into your visitors’ homes and let them watch it. Podcasts and videos served a greater purpose, too. They make your blog much more attractive to the audience by providing information in digestible, creative ways. You don’t want your blog to just be a bunch of text. No matter how well optimized your site, if you don’t present multimedia content in fun ways, you’ll have a hard time reaching an audience.
10. Have a consistent blogging schedule, and be persistent! You can’t blog sporadically and expect to draw a big audience, not even if you perform all of the SEO tricks. Also, don’t create unrealistic goals and then give up in a month. You must always find new ways to present content and interact with your customers, but you have post consistently to have any chance of building an audience.