The number one blogging tip for businesses trying to improve their ranking on the major search engines is simple: keep your writing natural.
This results in the number one benefit of blogging for business: the search engines find your site and, in so doing, promote your website, which is why blogging is essential for your business.
This blogging strategy for business applies to beginners as well as those who have been in the search engine game for quite a while.
So, what do we mean by keeping blogging natural?
Possibly we can understand this term by understanding what not to do.
A manufacturer has been placing blog posts on its site for more than a year. However, the blogging has not improved the company’s rankings or added that many visitors to the site. The company discovers that a key reason this is happening is that they have not placed enough keywords or the correct keywords into their blog postings.
Most of them, and we’re talking about more than 150 posts, have no keywords in them at all. Also, there are no links in the posts, whether internal links to the company’s products or external links to supporting information that would add credibility to the blog.
And in those blog posts that have links, many links no longer work or go to web pages that have been taken down, resulting in the dreaded “404 Page Error.” Broken links in blogs are also seen as a no-no by the search engines.
So, this manufacturer puts together a team, and they rewrite all the posts as fast as they can and place as many links in them to their products and outside sources as they can. They are in a rush to get rid of the old blog posts and have made a game of it. The winner of the game is the person who rewrites the most posts.
Unfortunately, what this manufacturer is doing – rushing to repackage its posts in the hopes of improving search engine optimization – may have devastating results. It sends shockwaves out into the Internet. Search engines suspect this manufacturer is trying to play a search engine game. The result could be the search engines blacklisting this site. Essentially, this means the site no longer exists as far as they are concerned.
So how do we avoid getting in this search engine game trap?
We keep it natural. It is fine to repackage the blog posting to add relevant keywords and links to them…but we do this slowly and naturally, avoiding the shockwaves.
Blogs should always be professionally written and provide the visitor with quality information. This can take some time. So instead of your team rushing to click the “publish” button so many times every day, let’s scale that back to publishing one or two repackaged posts a week.
That’s much more natural and will be welcomed by the search engines. It shows the site is alive, being updated, and should be checked out.
Some safe blogging guidelines with keywords include the following:
· Decide ahead of time what your main keyword is for this blog post; there may be several, but one should stand out as the most relevant.
· Put the most relevant keyword in your blog post’s title.
· Include that keyword in your post’s first sentence (sometimes it helps to bold or italicize it).
· Sparingly sprinkle the keyword and other keywords throughout the blog.
· Have subheads and add keywords to the subheads.
· Make sure the keyword is found in the last sentence of the post.
· And most importantly, use the most relevant keyword about once every 100 words in the post. If the blog is 600 words, for instance, the keyword should be included no more than six times; sometimes, a bit less is a bit more when it comes to effective SEO.