Every single person who’s interested in ranking his or her company website on the top of Google search engine results for specific keywords, knows the importance of blogging and creating great and original content.
Blog is an amazing SEO tool, because every new post you write and publish, instantly becomes a web page for itself, and, as you already know – every new web page is another opportunity to rank well for specific queries that your potential customers are constantly typing into their browsers.
Thanks to that, these days, a lot of businessmen are adding blogs to their marketing mix. Next to giving you the opportunity to capitalize on specific queries, a blog also allows its writer to share his or her knowledge and expertise about a certain subject with the world, and thus guide even the most educated users or potential clients to make smarter decisions.
Judging by some of the changes that Google is making to its algorithm, I think that in the near future blogs will become even more important for every business that wants to gain something out of its online presence.
Even though this is quite transparent and undoubtedly true, most blog owners still make the same old mistakes – buying links, creating duplicate content, chasing pagerank, leaving automated titled tags, overstuffing their pages with keywords, writing dumb and useless blog posts, hosting their blogs with free web hosting providers, etc.
That’s why we at AltusHost have decided to help you, our clients and readers, understand how to easily turn your blog into a powerful SEO machine, that will multiply your leads and increase your ROI:
1. Don’t Just Answer Queries – Create Content That Actually Solves Problems
If you have, for an example, an online e-commerce platform, you’re basically just selling your stuff from a posh digital cart. So when someone completes a purchase, if they don’t need anything else from you, they’re gonna leave your site.
Your blog is what keeps them coming back for more.
In one of the previous posts on this blog, titled 6 Golden Rules For Writing Killer Content For The Web, I’ve wrote about how to actually tailor texts for the Web that stimulates people to read it from top to bottom. If you haven’t read it, now would be a good time to do so, because now we are going to look at content marketing and content production from a whole different perspective.
Although a lot of companies these days are trying their hardest to jump onto this content marketing bandwagon, most of their efforts tend to go to waste because of the same ol’ thing – they don’t know how to anticipate their users intent. They don’t know who they are addressing with their posts and advertisements, and what type of content stimulates their potential clientele to interact with the brand.
It doesn’t matter what you do or sell, your clients and customers are always people. Whether you run a B2B or a B2C operation, establishing real relationships with real people should be on top of your priority list.
In order to do that, in order to make your visitors see that there are actual people behind your brand, you need to go beyond just providing answers to frequently asked questions and talk about pain points that your customers actively need help with.
Do some research online about the things that are bugging your clients, figure out how to fix them – then start writing
Read your audiences and customers questions, and turn them into “Dear, John Doe” blog posts that provide real answers, to real problems.
People love these sort of things. They make any brand feel more real.
A lot of content-driven businesses are focusing far more on keywords, than on people whom they’re trying to reach. Although using these queries as an SEO tactic for your blog is basically a good choice, they still need to be backed by all sorts of other posts which focus on your and users pain points.
Keep this in mind when creating your content calendar for an upcoming couple of months.
2. WordPress – Help Your Blog Become SEO-Friendly
Although content plays the biggest part here, good web design and structure greatly affect SEO as well. That’s why most people, when choosing a platform for their site, usually go for WordPress.
Originally visualized as a blogging software, over the years, WP has evolved into a full Content Management System, that allows you to turn your site into almost everything you want it to be.
Thanks to its numerous built in search optimization tools, it comes ready to embrace Google.
WP also has a number of third party plugins and hacks which can be used for search engine optimization (SEO). All you have to do is choose a great and responsive theme, add tools like Yoast SEO, and you’re basically ready to rock.
WP is quite easy to use and manage. If you’re not familiar with this platform, there’s no need to panic. We at AltusHost have created numerous free and easy-to-understand video tutorial that will help you master this software in no time:
3. Tie Everything Together – Internally Link and Cross-Reference Blog Posts
Linking internally is quite important for SEO.
If you tie your newly created content to older, useful and relevant resources on your site, people will be provoked to visit other pages on your site, and thus, help you retain users, decrease bounce rates, and pass good link juices to others pages as well.
Posting the same article on more than one site will anger Google. It will recognize it as duplicate content, which means that the first article you publish, probably won’t be affected, but the second and third, and so on, and so on – well, let’s say that they’ll basically end up in the toilet.
4. Make It Easy For People to Share Your Content
Believe it or not, but Google is now using social media actions and signals to determine the relevancy and authority of a certain text that’s hosted online.
Having this in mind, nowadays it’s extremely important to stimulate social engagement for your brand and site. If hundreds or even thousands of people are interacting with a certain page – Google will notice that and reward your content with a much needed additional push.
So, now that we got that in the clear, the question we need to ask ourselves is: “How do we get people to share or interact with our post on social media?”
Next to the two obvious solutions like writing great and relevant content, and creating a big network for your brand, the important thing to keep in mind here is:
If it’s not convenient for them, people won’t share your stuff. They will acknowledge it, read it, or maybe even like it in their heads, but if you make it complicate for them to post that certain content on their pages – the chance are, you’re not gonna get that already deserved share or retweet.
That is why it’s quite necessary to add plugins to your site that make it possible for people to instantly and easily share your content. Naturally, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Getting noticed on social media has become a real struggle for most brands who operate online. Luckily, there are a lot of smart people out there who unselfishly share their knowledge with the world. One of them is Jeff Bullas. I read a great post on this subject on his blog. You should check it out as well.
5. Think Of An Outreach Strategy
Cross-promoting related blog posts on various other authority domains is a real serenade for Google. In case you didn’t know, most successful content marketing professionals have an outreach strategy. They use various different techniques and approaches to generate positive word of mouth by posting texts and comments about their products and services on other relevant sites.
An effective and well thought through outreach strategy can add credibility to your brand and enhance reputation within your niche.
Apart from getting high-quality backlinks that help you rank well in search engines, outreach gives you the opportunity to demonstrate your value on a whole new platform and present your business in the proper way in front of a large group of potential customers.
You are given the opportunity to communicate with potential customers like never before – through organic and natural examples of good practice. What more could you ask for?
Recent statistics showed that 38% of bloggers blog about brands and 65% of bloggers follow brands on social media. That is why blogger outreach has become so popular among brands, agencies and organizations.
I have already talked about guest blogging on this website. In my opinion, if you’re an expert and you’re presented with the opportunity to showcase your knowledge on another party’s credible website – there’s no reason why you shouldn’t go for it.
Even as cubs in the industry, guest bloggers, if they open all the right doors, can instantly become authority figures among their peers.
Although this is an amazing and extremely valuable SEO strategy, getting your content posted on top authority sites isn’t quite easy. A lot of sites don’t accept third party content, and some of them that do – well, they tend to have a lot of rules what sort of things go or don’t on their blog.
If you’re interested in learning more about this subject and how to get your content published on sites in insanely big audiences’, be sure to read an older post on this blog, titled “Is Guest Blogging Actually Worth The Effort?” – there you’ll learn everything you need to know about outreach and chasing quality backlinks.
Thank you so much for sticking around to read my latest blog post from top to bottom. If you have any questions on this matter – I would be more than happy to answer them for you. All you have to do is write your thoughts down in the comments section below, and I’ll get back to you ASAP.
That’s it for now,
See you soon again,
Goran @ AltusHost B.V.
The author is highly qualified and writes blog posts weekly.
