The Importance of SEO in Blogging

Internet has changed every facet of our life, right from reading to buying to doing business. Constant advancements in technology have brought the world together and this means a wider audience for any business. Online businesses can now sell their goods and services to people located in any part of the world and this is an important reason for spending more time and effort in creating awareness of the business to Internet users. There are many ways to do it, but the best and most effective option is SEO.

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SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and this form of Internet marketing revolves around search engines like google, yahoo and bing. When a user enters a search query, the search engine displays a set of results and the user can choose from these results. The results are nothing but a collection of websites that are relevant to the user’s searched phrase. When the user visits the website, it is a direct publicity for the business.

However, to ensure that a website is displayed when the user enters a related search query, there are a few techniques that should be followed. This is because search engines use complicated algorithms to decide which site is most appropriate for a search query and the order in which it should be displayed. SEO is the set of techniques that will help search engines to display your website when a related query is made by any user.

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The primary way to make a web page SEO-compliant is to use meta tags and meta description. The tags should contain keywords that are relevant to the business while the description should talk about the core business. It should be short and crisp and not a lengthy explanation of every aspect of the business. Most search engines look for these two factors to make a “short-list” of relevant sites. Meta tags and meta description will help your page to get displayed as one of the results, but it may not be in the first or second page of the results. This is also important because most users do not prefer to look beyond the second page for information. Therefore, the rank of your page is also important. For maximum visibility, it should be displayed in the first page.

So, how can you get the search engine to display your web page in the first page of results? Link building is a popular technique to achieve this goal. When more and more external pages in other sites link to your page, there is a higher chance for your page to get displayed in the first few results. Links to your website can be posted on article directories or forums or in other blogs to build the number of links to your page.

Business analytics is another part of SEO that helps the business to keep track of visits to the page and the source of the visits. It helps the business to know more about the people who visit the site and can make changes to their products, depending on this information. This will help them to improve their business and its profitability.

Now that we have seen a broad overview of SEO, let us see how it can be used in blogs.

SEO in blogs

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SEO is important in blogs to generate more traffic to your business. Blogs are ideal for implementing SEO because they are naturally rich in text and link-friendly. They are also frequently updated and so the search engines crawl them numerous times.

Why should blogs be optimized for search engines? The most important reason to optimize blogs is to generate more traffic to the blog. If the blog is related to any online business, then it gives greater visibility to the business. When the user visits the blog or the related website of the business, there is a possibility for the user to buy a product and this is a direct revenue for the business. Even if they do not buy anything, there is a possibility that they can buy something in future or recommend the website to their contacts. This creates more visibility for the business and can soon translate into higher profits for the business. This is why many businesses use blogs to promote their business because they are simple, easy and effective.

Tips to make a blog SEO-friendly

As a blogger, there are some tips and tricks that that you can follow to make your blogs SEO-friendly.

• Firstly, use the keyword in the URL of your blog. For example, if the keyword for your business is content writing, your URL can be contentwritingblogs.com or if you are using a blogging service like blogger.com, your sub-domain can have the word ‘content writing’ in it. This not only gives you more branding, but it will also help users to identify your blogs easily.
• While registering your domain, make sure it is for a long period of time. Shorter periods of registration indicate spam blogs and if the search engine believes that you are going to be around for a long time, it can boost your page rank.
• Try to use the keywords in the title of your blog because most blogging software use the title to create a permalink, that in turn will be used by the search engines. You can use your keywords in any anchor texts that are used to link to other blogs. This will increase the search rank for your blog.
• If you have more than one keyword, use the primary keyword in the title and the secondary keywords in the body of the article. It is a good idea to have them in the first few sentences of the article for maximum effect. Make sure they read naturally in such a way that the reader should not be able to identify the keyword in the article. This will help improve the readership of your blogs.
• The article should be rich in content and should be useful for the reader. In general, the post should be at least 250 words long.
• Try to stick to one topic only in every post instead of covering numerous topics. Keep it simple and focused.
• Avoid plagiarism at any cost. It can show you in bad light amongst your readers.
• Another common mistake that should be avoided is to post the same content in multiple places. For example, if you have three domains and if you publish the same article in all three websites, then search engines may even block your sites completely.
• The number of times a keyword appears in the blog should be restricted to 2 or 3 at the most. This will prevent your article from sounding bad.
• The design of your blog is also important for SEO. Make sure each blog has links to previous posts so that all links can be crawled easily by search engines.
• You can also create links to your blog from other blogs or forums or article directories or even from sensible and legitimate comments in other blogs. These links should be from higher ranking websites that are relevant to your content.
• There are many companies that sell links from high ranking websites. You can consider this option as well. However, do a lot of research before you resort to this option because Google has been cracking down on these sites.
• You can swap links with other bloggers who have articles on a similar topic.
• If you have images in your article, make sure the alt tag has your primary keyword.
• You can also have many outbound links in your article. Outbound links, as the name implies, are links that relate to other websites from yours. These links also helps to improve your page rankings.
• Update your blog as frequently as possible so that the search engine crawler can index your links better and can display the blog when a user types in a related keyword.
• You can submit your posts’s URL to search engines so that they can index it and display when a user searches for related keywords. There are many services like Pingomatic that send notifications to websites and search engines about your new post and you can try using them to get ranked quickly.
• You can also submit your RSS to search engines like Yahoo.
• Write as many posts as you can because Search engines look into the quantity of content to determine the ranking.

These tips will go a long way in making your blog rank first or second in the search result and it will give a big boost to your business as well.

Conclusion

In short, blogs are a great way to promote your business on the Internet because they are SEO-friendly. Only a little extra effort is required to make them more attractive to search engines. You can follow the tips mentioned above to generate more traffic to your website.