SEO for Bloggers

One of the most common pieces of advice businesses receive is to start a blog. This will help boost their online visibility and it will create a forum through which they can interact with their target audience. Great! Now what? As of February 2011, there were over 156 million public blogs. How is your one blog, especially a startup blog at that, supposed to stand out? Here are some SEO tips that can help.

Offer what people want. If you made cookies and knew your customers loved chocolate chip, there’d be no reason to worry about oatmeal, right? In other words, you give them what they want. What are people searching for? One example, according to Business Insider, is the question, “What is a blog?” There are 151 million global monthly searches for this very phrase, so why not address it in your blog? While your blog can, and should, contain a variety of material, do make sure to include topics that correspond to frequently searched-for topics. Don’t sacrifice your content quality, and always make sure it is relevant to your readers.

Take some time to research keywords. To use our cookie example again: “cookies store” gets about 60,500 global monthly hits compared to 18,100 “cookie shops.” “Bakeries” beats them both with over 6 million hits. So, it would make sense to check out which keywords see more traffic so you can incorporate them (naturally and without detracting from quality) into your posts.

Work on good content. Content, content, content. If you don’t have great content, nothing else really matters. With high quality posts, other blogs and sites will link to you, people will “like” or +1 you, and you increase the visibility and credibility of your blog.

Starting a blog for your business can seem daunting because there is simply so many other blogs out there. Make yours stand out with good SEO techniques and even better content to draw readers and keep them coming back.