Telephone: 01257 410282
Telephone: 01257 410282
The internet has changed a lot over the last few years and things are a lot more competitive than they once were. If you’ve never run a blog before you might be wondering how it can help, but blogging for SEO is actually one of the top strategies for sending more visitors to your website. Let’s dig into this topic in a little more detail and go over just how this can help you improve your website ranking on Google and other search engines.
The internet is full of millions of websites competing for coveted first page rankings, but how is Google supposed to know which ones to put at the front of the pack? How does a website tell the world “hey, I’m great and I need to be seen!”?
There are a lot of factors that go into this process and blogging can help you hit quite a few of them. Publishing a blog can improve your relevancy, add high wordcount pages, build authority signals, introduce new keywords to rank for, improve your on page time and help to satisfy Googles desire for fresh content.
Starting out blogging can be a little scary, but there’s no need to worry if you follow some simple guidelines. The benefits of blogging are absolutely worth the small amount of effort required to learn the basics. Go over these tips for some advice on the basics of how to blog correctly.
1) Do - Blog about what you knowIt doesn’t matter what kind of business you run, you almost certainly have some great insider knowledge that people outside of your industry don’t have a clue about. Taking the time to share the topics you really understand at a high level will result in fantastic content that readers will love.
Contrary to popular belief, people on the internet can tell when you don’t know what you’re talking about. It might be tempting to chase after trending topics to bring in more visitors, but unless you have a solid understanding or the ability to hire a writer that does you’re just going to waste time and money.
Whenever you create a blog post for your website you should be taking search intent into account. What is search intent? Simply put, it’s the end goal of someone making a web search for a specific term. If you’re not able to identify a reason why someone would search for what you’re writing about you should probably avoid posting it.
While you might think you have the most amazing ideas for blog posts going, you might end up disappointed if you spend hours crafting the perfect piece of content and nobody ends up reading it. Researching topics and post ideas will help you to identify areas to target before you waste effort on things that don’t produce results.
Google is arguably the greatest source of free web traffic a website owner could ask for. With that in mind, it pays to play by their rulebook. The Google search algorithm uses relevancy as a huge ranking factor when it comes to content production.
In simple terms, this means that you need to be publishing blog posts that are highly relevant to your industry. Not only will this provide you with valuable relevancy search signals but it will also build authority for your site, which is another important ranking factor.
6) Don’t - Fill your blog with off-topic ramblingsIf you run a plumbing business you want to be blogging about plumbing and probably the local area you serve too, that’s about it. It’s incredibly important not go to off topic and mess up your relevancy indicators though. So, while it might be tempting to post about your dogs birthday on your plumbing blog, remember to think twice before you inadvertently harm your relevancy.
Creating posts that are visually pleasing and easy to read is an important part of search engine optimisation. Readers are far more likely to stay on your page if the content is easy to consume, which helps improve the all important time on page.
Use headers to break up blog posts into sections and add images to illustrate points in simple visual language that can help readers to understand your posts. Remember that a huge number of web users are now browsing on mobile devices and bitesized chunks of text are much easier for them to consume.
8) Don’t - Post a giant wall of textFor every well structured piece of writing that someone publishes online there are a hundred badly formatted ones. It doesn’t matter if your content is incredibly well written and covers the topic in detail if it’s offputting to readers. Big blocks of text that aren’t separated by headers, paragraphs and images are not going to win you any fans.
Anything you publish on your blog is a direct reflection of you or your business. Publishing well written content that covers topics in detail will not only make you look good, but it does wonders for search engine rankings. Google especially loves long form articles that dig right down into the gritty details. In fact, the average first page Google result is in the region of 1,500 words.*
Google hates thin content. Publishing posts with very little information and low word counts can actively harm your website. Blogs aren’t the place for single paragraph information posts, try Twitter or Facebook instead for this kind of content.
In order for your website to see the benefits of blogging you’ll need to use a blog that’s built into the site. While there are free blogging platforms like Blogspot and Wordpress.com they don’t actually provide the valuable SEO benefits to your site when you use them.
If you’re the kind of person who says “I don’t want to waste time learning confusing jargon, I just want to get to publishing my blog”, then Highpoint Media can help you.
HighpointCMS allows you to easily publish a blog without any confusing technical knowledge required. We use it to create all our websites, which means everyone gets access to this powerful set of tools.