If you are willing to put in the time and effort to create quality content on a consistent basis, running a company blog can be incredibly beneficial for your site’s SEO. First off, the search engines love content. If your blog is a part of your company site (companysite.com/blog) as opposed to a separate domain (companyblog.com), that is more content associated with your site for the search engines to crawl and index. Secondly, since search engines rank individual pages and not sites as a whole, each blog post can rank in the SERPs, increasing your online brand presence. But in order to get the most value from your company blog, it has to be properly optimized, just like your site.
Here are 3 ways to optimize your blog for better SEO:
Make it shareable
Even great content needs a little help attracting eyeballs, and social media is the perfect platform for content sharing and promotion. You can incorporate share buttons into your blog as plugins that let readers post a preview of your content to social networking sites like Facebook and Google+, send a message out through Twitter with a link to the post, submit it to social bookmarking sites, e-mail it to a friend and more.
Links are the bread and butter of SEO and social media signals carry a lot of weight with the search engines. (So much so that Google created its own share button, the +1 button). “If you build it, they will come” isn’t a mantra that works very well for blog optimization. If you want people to find your content and for it to rank well in the search engines, you have got to promote it and let others easily share it.
Employ a spam filter
Believe it or not, the comments on your blog could be negatively impacting the success of your blog posts in the search engines. The search spiders just see the comments as more content to crawl and index. If you let every comment go live without checking it first, you are going to get hundreds if not thousands of spam comments promoting weight-loss products, cheap generic drugs, natural male enhancement pills—the works. These spammy comments could drag your blog down with them. A spam filter will weed out the more obvious spam comments and leave you with the sneaky spam comments (that you can manually spam) and the real thing. It’s your blog; you have to be responsible for what others are saying on it!
Optimize posts naturally
First and foremost, you should never write content to rank, always write for the end user. But that doesn’t mean you can’t give your blog posts a little nudge to make them more search engine friendly. Optimize some of your blog posts by targeting long-tail keywords in the headline and URL. You can also pepper the post itself with targeted keywords, but only if they flow with the content! Never force keywords into a post.
You can always go back to some of your older posts and re-optimize them (providing they are still relevant). Re-optimizing old posts is a good way to bring them back to life and maybe drive more traffic to your blog/company site.
Your blog is a great place to build up your reputation as an industry professional and connect with your target audience. The whole nature of blogs is centered on content, and the most successful bloggers routinely produce great, interesting and useful content that directly impacts their readers. If you want your blog to resonate with your audience, you have to write to solve their problems. Don’t use your blog just to promote you own products and services!