Guest Article
You are taking all levels of effort to make sure your blog is branded, engaging and consistent, but are you powering it with SEO tactics to fuel an engagement from the most important of Internet entities – Google? Google loves to scour blogs and is happy (yes, happy) to reward genuine ‘white hat’ content.
However, Google cannot reward what it cannot scrutinize. That means all of your hard work in building your blog’s brand awareness, positioning yourself as a thought leader, nurturing connections with social media influencers and generating timely, entertaining and relevant content are literally going to waste if the one entity with the most Internet mojo doesn’t realize you are even publishing.
Blogging is content marketing.
Blogging with SEO power is content marketing – with Google in mind!
What are 5 ways to SEO power your blog to be worthy of Google’s glare?
- Keywords. Keywords. Keywords. Every blog post you publish becomes a new designation with the potential to score happy points with Google. Keyword-rich headlines, topics and themes will boost your online visibility, attracting more visitors to your blog, encouraging more social shares and attracting the attention of Google. To be sure you are on the right keyword path, select some keywords that ring a bell with your topic and test them using Google AdWords Keyword Planner. Keyword Planner is like a workshop for building new Search Network campaigns or expanding existing ones. You can search for keyword and ad group ideas, get historical statistics, see how a list of keywords might perform, and even create a new keyword list by multiplying several lists of keywords together. Plus, it’s free!
- Be An Original. Make sure your content is original – every element, from images to video. Google is constantly looking for original, useful content. Deliver a blog that is totally original and clever – even sporting a unique blog title. One brilliantly original blog title, scoured by Google, can result in a powerful content platform on which to build. Remember, your blog needs to be engineered for SEO success – which means it must be original every step of the way.
- Promote Your Blog On Social Media – Maniac Style. You need to be the greatest zealot of your blog – enthusiastic, even fanatical, although not a total social sharing crackpot! When it comes to promoting your blog and powering it for SEO, social media plays an increasingly greater role. Google is always checking out social media to evaluate the authenticity, originality, authority and even relevance of today’s content. If your blog is getting big action on Facebook and Twitter, it is nothing but pure gold. Leverage social media to build your blog’s following and embrace your blog’s ambassadors! If hundreds or thousands of people are tweeting, retweeting, liking and sharing your blog, you are delivering content that is simply stupendous – and Google loves stupendous content. Don’t forget to add impossible to miss social share buttons to your blog!
- Load Your Tool Belt. As an option (and it may be a wise one) explore the host of SEO tools, trackers and crawlers that are available to boost your blog’s attractiveness to Google. There is Majestic SEO, a project that has been working over several years, crawling the Internet with one aim in mind – to map links between sites. Majestic SEO offers a vigorous set of link tools that helps you to analyze and track domains in absolute detail. Other tools such as Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider Tool, SEO PowerSuite, Moz On-Page Grader or Moz Rank Tracker and scores of others are out there – right now – ready to help you make sure you are powering your blog for SEO. By the way, don’t forget Google Analytics!
- Promote Every Post – All The Time. Your blog content, if wisely evergreen or at least durable enough to be fresh beyond a week or two, needs to consistently be promoted. Leverage clear pathways to your blog posts, with defined routes to previous and next posts, as well as sharing links to related posts devoted to similar themes, topics or observations. You always want to make the experience of reading and sharing your blog enjoyable and easy. Once you get eyes on your blog, make sure you are truly promoting the entire blog – not just one spectacular post. Navigational links that are inviting boost user engagement and create opportunities to turn one-time blog visitors into screaming fans.
“Seo Arrows Means Search Engine Optimization On Web” courtesy of Stuart Miles / www.freedigitalphotos.net
About the author: Chris Miles is the founder and CEO of award-winning Miles Technologies, experts in IT, business software, online marketing and web development.
really helpful blog for bloggers. thanks for sharing.