Little we need to emphasize the importance of blogs for promoting your business. Undoubtedly it is powerful, and helps to drive traffic to your website immensely, and in good volume. Though you can use other blogs to carry your contents, it is a good strategy to promote one (or more) by yourself on niches compatible with your chosen line of business. You can use blogs for –
- Building your brand’s image and educating your consumers
- Initiating dialogue and thereby establishing your leadership
- Publicizing your organizations expertise and skills
- Establishing contact with your consumers on regular basis
- Generating valuable leads to follow up
Blogging also has proved its worth as a powerful SEO tool for promoting professional websites. You will reap the benefits of blogging when it is done regularly and strategically. The benefits are -
- Your website gets more frequently crawled by search engines
- Brings in more backlinks organically
- Brings in organic traffic to your website
Though the potential of blogging is widely recognized, they are often neglected by website owners in their pursuit for superior search engine ranking. To give your website a good ranking, you first need to fine tune your blogs, and give it the same attention you will for your professional website. Blogs too need to be promoted in the internet just like any other website, and you must follow optimization processes.
Here are 6 killer-Mojo SEOs steps you should consider to make your blogs shine and work hard for your business.
1. Optimize Pagination
Blogs tend to grow faster than you may have imagined, and you need to make it easily navigable for the readers as well as search engine crawlers. The later is more important for SEO. The process of arranging the articles in a particular order in pages is called pagination and should be done with care. A single page that seems to run down for eternity is hardly what either readers or crawlers will want. By neatly arranging the pages and archiving, with the latest blog showing at the top, you will be making things easy for everyone, including crawlers.
To make navigation easier, follow the same pattern that Google uses to arrange pages after pages of search results. This is a time tested way to provide optimal navigation, and you will never go wrong.
2. Group Related Posts
As said earlier, blogs grow fast, and if your blog has too many niches or topic heads, then chances are it will get buried where no one will be able to find them. By grouping niches, you are not only making life easier for readers, but also for search engines, and for you as well. You can for example provide a link such as “Related Article.” This will be helpful to crawlers when indexing your pages.
When posts are grouped based on some keywords, they become useful for readers who may want to locate posts using the search feature in your blog. If you are using WordPress to power your blogs, then grouping related posts will not require any special effort.
3. Add “Previous” and “Next” at the End of Each Post
Grouping posts based on topic or niche is a great idea and you can add a little extra punch with “Previous” and “Next” links. It will help readers and crawlers to find the most relevant posts particular to a genre. This will encourage readers to go from one post to another resulting in visitors spending longer time on your blog site.
The average time spent by visitors on your blog is an important metric in ranking your blog. From a reader’s perspective, it gives good experience.
4. Categorize Logically
Categorizing your posts may sound simple and achievable. In practice, however, it isn’t. For proper categorizing you need to look through your readers’ perspective, as well as the crawlers’. By categorizing, you will be able to provide easy access to posts in a logical manner.
Categorizing is a tricky business – once you are into it, you may want to introduce new categories too often and in too many numbers. Too many categories (and sub-categories) are a turn off for most readers, and it can confuse crawlers as well. You blog, remember; will be only as good as your categorization.
5. Title Tags, Article Title – Both Need Variety
The use of keywords is well understood by the blogging community. That is the reason why they have varities of them so that they are easily found by crawlers. But not every blogger is adept in varying titles. When too many titles have the same set of words in them, search engines tend to mistake everything for duplicates. You should therefore concentrate on the title tag element of the page’s code and make it as unique as possible.
When you have a vast array of titles in your blogs, search engines will have no difficulty in labeling them as unique. This again is an important metric in deciding your page’s search engine rank.
6. Include Share Buttons in Posts
The importance of social media is unquestioned – you have to be there to be seen and recognized. When someone shares your post, it not only gets read by others, but also helps your blog. A convenient way to do it is by providing share buttons for social media somewhere in the blog page where it can be easily accessed. When you include share buttons, be a little considerate to your readers, and see that they don’t distract or cause inconvenience.
Search engines lay great importance to social media, and when it circulates there, they give your blog posts immense popularity.
Having given few ideas on the modern SEO challenges, it would only be wise to conclude that there is no definite set of rules or metrics that define a great SEO work. However, these ideas are a safe bet.