Google loves fresh content, and your business blog is the best way for you to produce relevant, keyword-rich content on a regular basis. To fully optimize each blog posting for visibility on the search engines, you should follow the guidelines below.
Add Keywords to the Right Areas in Your Blog Posting
Each business blog posting you create should target a keyword phrase for which you want to be found on the search engines. This practice is one of the key elements of on-page search engine optimization. Once you’ve identified the keyword phrase, you will want to include it in the following sections on the blog posting:
- Page Filename or URL
- Page Title
- Page Heading
- Page Sub-headings
- Page Content
- Page Meta Description
- Page Meta Keywords
By including your keyword phrase in these areas, you make it easy for the search engines to understand what your blog posting is about.
Include a Relevant Image
A relevant image breaks up the content on your blog posting and gives your visitors a visual way to interpret the meaning of your blog posting. An image also gives you two more places where you can include your keywords for the blog posting — in the image filename and in the alt tag for the image. Use hyphens to replace the spaces in the filename and enter the keyword phrase in the alt without any changes.
Including a relevant images will also help with visibility in Google Image Search where it is often easier to appear for more competitive keyword phrases.
Automatically Ping Blog Directories
Using a service like Feedburner or Pingler to alert the blog directories that you published a new posting on your business blog can help your blog posting appear in the search engines faster because the search engines are crawling those directories more regularly than they are crawling your business blog. It’s possible to get temporary first page rankings on Google for your business blog posting for the day on which you published the posting. Notifying the blog directories when you publish helps make this happen.
Your business blog is your chance to regularly publish content for the search engines to consume. The more keyword-rich content you publish, the more opportunities you give people searching online to find you.
What other ways can you optimize your business blog postings?
Free Content Marketing Plan Template
This free template will help you plan your content marketing activity from identifying your target audience to creating an editorial calendar for managing what to post when.
Use the plan to better manage your blogging activity so you’re never short on ideas and you always have your target audience in mind when writing.
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