SEO Blogging Tips

Blogs are by nature meant to be topical and informal vehicles of communication. By extension, posts on frequently updated blogs tend to get crawled and indexed by search engines more often than changes made to corporate websites. As a result, a blog has a better chance than a regular website at getting its content indexed by Google quickly.

This can mean better rankings for your blog posts and potentially new visitors to your blog and/or website. Given the SEO benefits of a blog, individuals and businesses are using blogs to maximize the SEO traffic potential.

However, not every blog is successful. This article on blogs and SEO provides you a few tips and pointers on building a successful blog.

SEO Blogging Tip 1: Define Your Blog

At the very outset, define what your blog will be about, what topics you intend to cover in the blog, whether it will be your individual blog, corporate communication blog or a platform for your team to write on relevant subjects. Once the scope of your blog is defined, create your blogs information architecture, categories, sections and archiving mechanism meaningfully.

SEO Blogging Tip 2: Blogging Platform and Design

For large businesses wanting to create a unique and creative blog, it can be beneficial to create a custom blogging platform that matches the need and scope of your blog. However, this may not be practical for most individuals and small businesses. Choosing the right blogging platform can make a big difference to the success of your blog. You can choose one of the most common blogging platforms like WordPress, Blogger, MovableType, etc. Decide whether you need a paid blogging CMS or its free version. In most cases, the paid version will have additional features and plug-ins that may make a difference to your blog and its SEO compliance.

Similarly, the design of the blog conveys a lot about the blogger. It also needs to be intuitive and aligned to the categories, sections and scope you set out for your blog. While there are plenty of free blog templates available, they may or may not be ideal for the scope of your blog. Most templates will not be unique and will make your blog look like yet another blog. It is worth investing a little in creating a professional design for your blog that reflects its personality.

SEO Blogging Tip 3: Location of Your Blog

Blogging platforms like WordPress and Blogger let you create free blogs. However if you consider the long term benefits of a blog, consider hosting your blog on your own domain name instead of a third-party domain. Having your blog on your own domain will enhance credibility and have long term benefits as your blog matures and ages.

SEO Blogging Tip 4: Writing Blog Posts

While a blog is an informal platform that allows you to express freely, it is also important to think of the target audience of each blog post. Who do you foresee reading this blog post? What is that person likely to be searching for when your blog post should appear? What expressed search intent of your target reader does your blog post satisfy? When writing a blog post, write it from the reader’s perspective. At the same time, do some keyword research (Google Keywords Tool is a place to start) to identify terms related to your blog post that your target audience searches for. Including these meaningfully and in a reader-friendly way in your content will help your audience find your post.

SEO Blogging Tip 5: How Can You be Different?

Why should someone want to read your blog when there are potentially hundreds, if not thousands of others writing about the same or similar issues? If there is a big story in your industry, chances are everyone is talking about it. Why should someone choose to read your version of the story? Can you give your posts a personal slant? Can you give it a new perspective? Can you highlight an uncommon and unique angle to the story? Not all blog posts and stories will be different, but if you can add an element of novelty to your posts every now and then, it will encourage others to follow your blog.