Last week I wrote a post on why it’s important to blog regularly. It’s important from a trust and relationship building perspective, but it also makes sense from a Search Engine Optimization perspective. I’m not qualified to write on SEO, but I know someone who is, and I did a shout out for a guest blog post.
@seowashdc, better known to some of you as Nancy Wigal of the Search Engine Academy of Washington DC, tells us all about why regular blogging is critical from an SEO perspective. She also gives us some tips on how to make our blogs more search engine friendly.
Take it away, Nancy!
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and blogging help you build relationships with your prospects and clients. Here’s how you can quickly and easily incorporate some basic SEO techniques to attract the right target audience.
Before you embark on that relationship, SEO shows you what is important and critical to say to your target market.
Start by applying SEO to your blog posts with keyword research. If you don’t know the words and terms your prospects and customers use online, how can you show up in their search results? How do you discover the words they’re using? You can read competitor’s blogs, ask your sales force/marketing team what they’re hearing and reading, and you can also ask your customers directly. By engaging your clients, you’re also fostering a relationship with them – they know that you really care, since you asked them for help.
There are number of keyword tools you can use. Wordtracker is a great tool because it shows you the number of searches, provides a thesaurus function, does lateral thinking for any term you enter, and shows you the number of competing web pages for the keyword term you’re targeting.
You can also use Keyword Finder or Google Insights for Search. The point is, do some research and target the right keywords for your market.
So you have keywords. Great – what do you do with them? At this point, look at them and start brainstorming blog topics around them. Let’s say you have six great keyword terms. Five of them could be stand-alone blog posts. This is wonderful news, because you can now develop a series of blog posts around these terms. You can create good content and if you’ve developed the theme properly, build some buzz and anticipation with each post.
Next, SEO and blogging are great relationship partners because the search engines love fresh, updated, regular content. Since you’ve done your keyword research and carefully laid out your blog posting strategy, you’re now very well positioned to publish regular, high quality content posts to build a relationship with your target audience. How often should you post?
As part of your overall marketing campaign, build a project timeline and include a calendar of regular blog posts. It could be as often as four times each week, or twice. It’s up to you. The more regularly you post new content, the more often the search engine robots will visit your site and rank your posts. The bottom line is, the more the better. The search engines love new content.
Now, you’re ready to write those blog entries. Use your keyword term in the post headline, the first paragraph and sprinkled throughout the post in context. In general, you want a keyword density of 4 – 8% for every 400 words of content. It’s not that many times you need to use the keyword term. Be careful not to overuse the term, and feel free to use synonyms, since search engine algorithms recognize those as well.
Just keep everything in context and most of all, write high quality, informative, useful blog posts. Just to be very clear – you’re not writing the blog post for the search engines – you are writing for your target audience, but applying these SEO techniques will get your blog posts to come up higher in search engine results for the keyword term you selected.
Now you’re armed with some simple, but powerful SEO techniques to help your blog posts build a relationship with your target market for increased sales and profits. Happy hunting!
Thanks Nancy! Anyone have anything to add?
