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If you’re not yet thinking about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) when you’re writing your blog posts, then you’re missing a simple way to help promote your content in search engine results.
It’s something I didn’t give a lot of thought to until recently, and I can see it makes a difference.
The use of SEO often falls to the marketing and web teams, who, among other tactics, buy Google AdWords to boost the visibility of a company’s website when users search for certain related keywords. I’m simplifying here, but stay with me.
A whole industry has developed around the use of SEO for advertising and marketing, and much of this is now employed in the blogosphere as well. Since PR wasn’t part of this process in the past, it’s not necessarily something we think about when we launch a blog, but it should be a priority.
A Few Quick Tips
If you’re going to invest the time to create great content, you should make sure people can find it as well. Blogs with dynamic content are indexed by search engine bots much more frequently than static webpages, and these bots are looking for certain clues in your posts to tell them what’s important on the page.
Here are a few quick ways to boost your blog’s page rank in search results:
- Hyperlink to relevant text: “This post is about SEO for corporate blogs.” The way many search engines work is that as they index a blog, they give more weight to the words that are linked via hypertext. So let’s say I wanted to link the previous sentence to another popular blog about SEO, which words should I choose to hyperlink? Either “SEO” or “corporate blogs” would be good choices since that’s what this post is about, but words like “post” or “about” would not add much value. The best advice is to make sure you’re linking to the meat of the content (a blogger’s name, the title of another blog post, etc.) and not the more generic words in the sentence.
- Link to other blogs in your industry/niche: if you want to raise your blog’s profile in your niche, then make sure that you’re linking to conversations on other blogs in your industry. Search engines look for related content, which is why it’s important that your blog posts stay on topic and focus on one subject as much as possible. If you’re talking about your weekend plans in one post, the economy in another and your company’s product in another, it will take a lot longer to build up your ranking in one area. This will also help keep your blog focused on one topic.
- Link to more popular blogs: The more you can link to posts from blogs with more traffic than you, the more likely you are to receive traffic from that blog. Also, search engines will count this as an endoresement and boost your ranking as a result. Remember, you need to link to more popular blogs in your niche to achieve these results.
- Make your headline count: Search engines give extra weight to the titles of each post. The logic here is that if you are emphasizing those words visually for your visitors, then those words are probably key to your site’s content, too.
Tools
I’ve found these tools useful for determining how to structure posts using SEO:
- Google Keyword Tool: make sure to click on the “website content” button on the left side, then search your own blog or that of your competitor to get a sense of keywords based on the content of the webpage/blog. You can use this to then make sure you integrate the right words in your post to return improved results.
- Google Insights: this is my favorite new tool because the options are just limitless. Play around and find out interesting information about your niche, including where searches for certain words originate, historical statistical data or even keywords within your own industry. Google has a useful tutorial to get you started.
SEO Blogs
The two that I’ve learned the most from are Search Engine Land and SEO Chat, the latter of which is more of an aggregator of SEO conversations where I’ve found a tremendous amount of useful information lately. In the PR/Marketing space, I recommend reading Lee Odden, who posted a bunch of SEO case studies last month.
Free SEO Webinar and Podcast
This podcast posted by Eric Schwartzman from On the Record Online features an interview with Russell Wright, where he offers some quick tips on SEO. If you have an hour, it’s worth the listen. Otherwise, you can skip to the parts that you’re most interested in via the notes Eric provides.
Finally, Nathan Gillatt points to an upcoming free webinar hosted by Visible Technologies titled, “Is Your Search Engine Reputation Helping or Hurting Your Brand? Why Online Reputation Management is Critical for Brands and Individuals.” The webinar is on September 30. I don’t know anything about the presenters, but the topic sounds like it’s on target.
If you have more questions about how to optimize your blog using any of the above SEO techniques, please include them in the comments. And if you have any other resources you’ve found useful, please share those as well!
