A business blog is not a newsletter. It’s not a platform for your political views, or a photo gallery for your family photos. A WordPress business blog is a device to add fresh content to your website in short bites about subjects that are relevant and related to your business. This is becoming increasingly important for search engine optimization (SEO). Fresh content is the 2012 New Year’s Baby.
- What’s new in your industry that your customers/clients might like to know?
- What tips about your product or services might you pass along to your clientele?
- What new offerings are you pleased to make public?
One of the best ways to find a hot topic in your industry is to peruse the Google Blogsearch. Just enter your main keyword and voila! Up comes a list of blog topics that have recently been written. While it’s in good form to pick up on subject matter, it’s bad form to outright copy another blog – duplicate content get penalized by the search engines. (In fact, bear that in mind for your own site content – make sure you haven’t duplicated your site text from page to page, or page to blog.)
It’s a good practice to refer to another blog when you’ve found something interesting to share. You’ll need the full URL (blog site in the browser address bar) to create the link, so copy that first. You create a simple link to the other blog by highlighting the blog name in your article while you’re writing, and then pressing the chainlink in the Visual editor icon panel and adding the direct link. The chainlink doesn’t show up unless text is highlighted.
The advantage to adding links is that it creates a link to a more highly ranked blog than your own. It’s a really, really good idea to go to the blog itself and leave a comment, like ‘Nice article! thanks for posting this’. Why is this important? Most blogs give you the opportunity to add your website address when you fill out the comment form, which remains hidden from view. But not hidden from the search engine’s view, which is the critical part. This then creates a backlink to your site from that highly-ranked site. Backlinks are one of the most important ranking criteria for search engines.
So let’s get back to What to Blog About. One client posts regularly on their blog, and in fact, has included an entire newsletter on their site to increase the number of posts to 8 a month. But the interesting story is that the posts are not focused using their main keywords. The posts are somewhat related, but not specifically about their topic. How does this impact their site traffic? It doesn’t – when people search using their keywords, their blog posts never show up. And, given the chance, Google will push those posts up to page one.
In direct contrast, another client posts once a week in a very competitive industry, and after one month, their blog posts are showing up on page one of the search, ahead of all those other highly ranked sites. Why? Because this blogger is smart – they create blog topics that include their keywords in both the title and the content.
Say you’re inured to your business subject. You’ve been in it so long that you can’t come up with anything new. Have you considered turning over your blog posting to someone else with a fresh eye to your business? Maybe an employee, a relative, or even a professional blog writer? Posts can be created by pros for as little as $25 a post, a minimal investment that can make the all the difference in where your site shows up in searches.
Looking for some help with your blog? We do that. Just drop us a line…
Subscribe to new SEO and WordPress posts:
[subscribe2 hide="unsubscribe"]
