We all blog in Team Rubber, and one thing we need to understand is the value of our blogging from a commercial perspective. Blogging isn’t just for fun, or for team knowledge-sharing, it should also be for
“world sharing” – i.e. optimising the blogs / sites we post to so that the rest of the world can find them more easily – and we sell more stuff to the right people ; – )
So this blog post gives some quick tips and advice for SEO-newbies into how blogging can be used to optimise the SEO of your website, making sure it has the best chance to go viral (and be found).
Some SEO basics
- – Google loves content
- – Google loves relevant content
- – Google loves well-structured content
- – Google loves very focused content
- – Google loves content that is loved by other people (i.e. content that is linked to)
- – Google loves content that is loved by popular people
- – Google loves content that is connected to other popular people
What this means when you blog – 11 tips on optimising for SEO
- 1) Write content that is very focused and relevant.
- 2) Make sure your blog post has a tight focused title – always thinking “what terms / question / phrase would someone search for?” For example, if you’re wanting to target keen bloggers, then they’re always interested in finding out “how to optimise the seo of my blog” – so give it as the title of your post!
- 3) Make sure that the link of the blog post (which is often auto-generated from the title of the blog post) contains the relevant search terms.
- 4) Make sure the opening paragraph repeats those key phrases – as the opening 30 or so words are the ones are judged as being particularly important.
- 5) Make sure you you link key words / phrases in your blog, to key pages in your site. For example if you write “Viral seeding is an effective way to gain brand awareness“. Link the words “Viral seeding” to the relevant page in your site you’re trying to optimise.
- 6) Keep repeating key phrases and terms throughout the blog post, and remember to do the relevant linking. Don’t go over board though – as this may look like SPAM to Google’s bots.
- 7) Include other relevant content in your blog posting – so maybe include a relevant YouTube video, or post a relevant (and tagged) image. This all adds to the richness and relevance of the blog.
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To show your blog post is connected and influential, drop is some links to other more influential sites. e.g. You may link to the Brand Republic site, if you’re talking about advertising – to indicate that you’re connected to other sites.
- 9) Once you’ve written your blog, make sure it’s linked to by other sites. N.B. the more influential the site linking to you, the better. So for example, Digg the blog via Digg.com, or link to the blog from another blog – e.g. the Team Rubber blog. To do this you might do a weekly blog round up of the best Team Rubber postings. You should also obviously Tweet the post – to optimise the opportunity for the blog being picked up by others.
- 10) Finally – remember to write interestingly and well. After all, much of the success of your blog post will be down to the how people enjoy and share your blog / content. If people think it’s great, then they’ll do the link sharing for you!
- 11) Finally #2 – consider how someone might find your post out of context, and make sure it ends with the right kind of call to action – e.g. you might write an end line along the lines of “If you’re interested in this, then you may be interested in the Viral Ad Network, which provides great fun ads for the best blogs and sites. Check it out our Viral Ad Network here!“
N.B. these tips were first posted on the Viral Ad Network blog, giving tips on how to optimise the SEO of your blog.
And if you’d liked to see proof that SEO works in linking and blogging, then it’s best to check out the Alarm Monitoring Company’s website who sell the best monitored alarm systems in the UK.
Tags: monitored alarm systems
“Make sure your blog post has a tight focused title”
Julian Sambles who is in charge of SEO at the Telegraph- http://yoast.com/newspaper-seo-think-visibility/- spoke at the Media Festival last year about exactly this.
Telegraph reporters have been trained to tweak their stories for the online version of the paper, making the titles of their stories much clearer to achieve better search traffic- he pointed out that reports with catchy/glib/pun-based headlines like the famous Falklands “GOTCHA!!!” were less likely to get found again by people searching for the news story about the sinking of the Belgrano than one titled “Belgrano Warship sunk in the Falklands”
Remember Point 10 too: you need to strike that balance between good SEO practice and interesting, informative writing, both in terms of content and style.
Search engine rankings are never really all that surprising. Google is definitely first, Yahoo! is always second and Bing comes in third every month, without fail. Sometimes Yahoo! or Bing will rise or fall just a little bit and one will benefit from the other’s loss, however it’s never an enormous drop.
January’s rankings were also on the same lines. Google came first, Yahoo! came second and Microsoft came third, experiencing a small gain over the previous month. However, in a most unusual turn of events Microsoft gained at the expense of Google for the first time.
According to ComScore (via CNet), Google’s dominant share of the search market slipped by 0.3 percentage points to 65.4 percent of all searches conducted in the U.S. Because of this, Bing increased by 0.6 percentage points to 11.3 percent of all searches. Yahoo! lost another 0.3 percent, dropping to 17 percent of all searches.
Microsoft Bing has experienced almost consistent growth since it launched last May, rising from 8.4 percent in June to its current 11.3 percent. Bill Gates once told the press that the search engine created by microsoft is the best product till date created by Microsoft. Hope that turns out true. People are already fascinated by the interface provided by Bing. [url=http://technoages.com/articles/bing-is-eating-googles-share-of-search-engine-traffic/]Let us wait and see if Bing can sustain its growth[/url]