Category Archives: SEO

Why Your Business Needs a Blog

I guess this post comes a little late, since I already talked about guest posting techniques for your blog. I should have started out with this post. But oh well! Better late than never.

One of the ways that SEO works is that your website will be more optimized with unique content. Having something new to post regularly will refresh your website and keep it relevant. It will also help you in terms of keywords. The more you write about topics relevant to your business, the more you will show up when those keywords are searched for on Google. It also has the added bonus of making you appear to be an expert in your field. If you share your blog posts on social media, you can drive more traffic to your home page, resulting in more exposure and more sales.

So, what should you write about? Really, this depends on your business. If you have a local business, write about your area. Absolutely write about anything that pertains to your products. You can also write about businesses in general, like how to make your office greener or anything relating to being an employee. If you find something interesting and think your audience might too, go ahead and write about it. Writing about social media is also a great idea.

Let’s create an example. We’ll make up a hypothetical beauty salon located in Denver, Colorado. If this beauty salon had a blog, they would want to write about Denver, Colorado; beauty products; being a freelance beautician; beauty school; beauty salons; different beauty treatments; keeping your body healthy; being an employee; advertising, especially on social media; celebrities and their beauty treatments; budgeting; and more. When it comes down to it, don’t limit yourself. You’ll do better to keep it relevant most of the time, but it’s more important to have fun with it and be creative.

Tips on Creating Keywords

Before you start working on SEO, you need to identify your keywords. Keywords are essentially phrases that you’re hoping people will search for on Google and find your business. If you own a sporting goods store in Colorado, your keywords are “sporting goods Colorado.” Companies can have many keywords at once, but it’s best to try to narrow it down. The same sporting goods store can use “rock climbing Colorado” or “camping equipment Colorado,” but remember that the more you have, the more your resources will be stretched thin. I’ll explain that further down. The reason why I included the location in the keywords is because local businesses are targeting a local audience. If you are targeting a national or online audience, your location will not be a keyword.

A good place to research keywords is Google Trends: http://www.google.com/trends/, When you type a search phrase into Google Trend’s query box, it will tell you how popular that search currently is on Google. It looks like this:

When a number is at 100 on the line graph, this means it is at it’s highest point of popularity. Often times, that means it’s also at its peak, but not always. Your keywords are generally pretty successful if they are at a high number and have a recent trend going only up. Going down isn’t the worst, as you never know when something will revive its popularity. For example, “Tiger Woods” was probably a popular search term during his last scandal a few years ago. If Tiger Woods does something to end up in the news again, the search term will most likely go up in popularity. If you do choose keywords that are heading downwards, you need to predict that, in the future, they will regain popularity.

Keep in mind that the “Region interest” section is a great one for helping you identify your audience.

After you’ve picked some keywords, try to put them into your domain name. This helps with SEO. Even if you don’t put them in your domain name, you want to have them in your website a lot. This includes lots of blog posts, tags on pictures, interspersed throughout your content, etc. Be careful though – too much is overkill. The rule of thumb is to use a keyword specific to one blog post only 3 times, including once in the title. Use the same keywords as tags on your blog posts and when you share your content on social media platforms.

The desired result is that your name will be at the top of the page when someone searches for those keywords. This is why I said you don’t want too many – for all of your keywords, you have to do a lot of work to optimize your website. However, you don’t want to go the opposite way and have too few either, otherwise you’ll only dominate one search phrase. How many you have will depend on your business, how many products/services you provide, and what you think your customers will search for.

And that’s pretty much it for keywords for now. Comments, questions, concerns, and anecdotes are welcome below.

Guest Posting for SEO

Many bloggers today use guest posting to promote their blog. This is a great strategy because both the original blog owner and the guest poster are sharing their audiences with each other.

This is also great for SEO purposes. Having more links to your blog will help get you to the top of Google’s search results. But how do you even begin a guest post strategy?

If you don’t already interact with other blogs, start now. If you have favorite blogs, definitely comment on them often (but be honest and sincere – not a spammer with constant comments!). If you find blogs that are similar to yours, especially in the topics, also establish a relationship with them.

If your friends have blogs, arrange some post trading. While re-blogging content is okay, it’s better for both of you if you share original content.

Once you have established relationships with other bloggers, first ask them to be a guest poster on your blog. Send them a quick email or comment. You can tell them that you really liked their thoughts on a certain topic, and ask them to write a post for you expounding on that original post. Or maybe they could write a similar post, but from a different angle. For example, if one person has some really good thoughts on fishing, ask them to write about fishing specifically in your area. If someone writes about living on an extreme budget, ask them how they plan birthday parties with very few expenses. There’s lots of ways they can repurpose content for you. Or, they could write something completely brand new!

After they have successfully written a post for you, tell them that you would love to return the favor sometime. Even if a blogger doesn’t yet want a guest post from you, it is important to maintain any good relationships you’ve created. Remember how hard it was to get to this point?

When you’ve finally been asked to write a guest post to publish on someone else’s blog, make sure you do your best work. You definitely don’t want this debut to be a throwaway piece. Try to write about something similar to the topics you’ve written about before. This will not only give new reader’s a taste of what your blog is generally like, but will also create tons of backlink opportunities for you. Not know what “backlinking” is? Check out this very post. I’ve already inserted 3 different backlinks into the text. Can you find them? Look at the hyperlinks – the words underlined and turned blue. Now click on them. Did they take you to another website? If you mention another blog post in your guest post, make sure to include a hyperlink to it. This will increase traffic to your website, as well as help your SEO rankings.

If you don’t want to use your relationships to create guest posting opportunities, try a few different websites that will allow you to post your guest post to a directory. Then blog owners will be able to find your post and publish it to their website. This will draw in random viewers that would not normally be able to obtain. One such website isĀ http://myblogguest.com/, but there are many others!

So good luck with your guest posting strategy!