Your company blog is an extremely important part of your inbound marketing strategy.
The content that you post to your blog can boost the effectiveness of your website's SEO strategy, thereby increasing your site's search engine ranking and bring in more organic web traffic.
Unfortunately, many marketers and bloggers will just cram their blog content full of keywords and leave it at that. This is not how SEO works - and it will render your efforts pretty much useless.
The following are a few SEO blogging tips that you should keep in mind when creating content:
Let's just get this one out of the way - it doesn't matter how well your content is optimized for SEO or how rich your keywords are if the content is of poor quality.
Bad blog content can still attract readers, but you are not going to have much success converting those readers - and you're certainly not going to convince them to come back.
Before you begin worrying about SEO, worry about the quality of your content.
One of the most common mistakes that bloggers make is that they don't bother researching the keywords that they use.
The keywords that you choose to optimize your blog content with should be both relevant and competitive.
Keywords that aren't relevant to your blog post are going to cause annoyed readers to hit the back button as soon as they arrive on your page, causing a high bounce rate that can negatively affect your Page Ranking.
Then there's the matter of using competitive keywords.
If you operate a small, local computer repair service and are posting a blog piece on common computer viruses, then using the keyword "computer" is probably not a good idea. There's no way you are going to rank highly for this keyword considering the other businesses that use this keyword. A simple Google search for this keyword will reveal the a search result page full of huge corporate websites, from Dell to Amazon. You need to use stronger, more competitive keywords. For example, "common computer viruses" or "computer virus prevention in Dublin, Ireland."
Research your direct competition's use of keywords and consider using PPC (pay per click) advertising to test out some of your chosen keywords before implementing them into your blog.
Once you have strong keywords, use them to properly optimize your blog content.
Doing so will help Google to identify and categorize your content more effectively.
The following are the different places where you should optimize your content for SEO using your chosen keywords:
Black hat tactics are unethical tactics used to artificially boost your search engine rankings via loopholes found in Google's algorithm.
For example, over using keywords throughout your content, link farming to earn more external links and cloaking.
These tactics can fool Google temporarily, but they will catch on - Google are smarter than you. When they find that you are guilty of using these black hat tactics, they will punish you - whether it's by demoting your ranking or removing you from their search results altogether.
Neither are great from a marketing standpoint.
It can be tough to find the right balance - especially if your keyword comes naturally within the context of your content. If you use your keyword too often, you could be tagged by Google as using black hat tactics. To avoid this, try to keep your keyword density between one and two percent.
Links pointing to your blog signify to Google that your content must be of high quality if another website is bothering to link to it.
However, those links should come from high quality sources as Google will judge the page rankings of your external links to help eliminate black hat link building tactics.
The following are effective - and ethical - ways to earn links:
These are some of the best SEO blogging tips that you can use in order to make your blog a more effective marketing tool.
Have we missed any major ones? What would you add to this list?