Blogging doesn’t involve just writing: it involves promoting your content and making it rank for relevant search terms, too. Don’t worry if you’re not a technical expert or SEO rock star: like in most areas of Internet marketing, there are tons of ways to improve your performance in SEO-focused blogging, and it sounds a lot easier than it actually is.
If you’re not quite convinced that you should have anything to do with SEO when blogging, just remember that getting people to your site who are already interested is much easier than the kind of cold, hard sell tactic used by most traditional outbound marketers. So drive those visitors to your site. Here are 4 tips to improve your inbound Internet marketing tactics with a blog:
Write Creative Headlines
Write blog headlines that will drive clicks on Twitter. Think from a user perspective; there are 60 million tweets sent out each day. Getting people to click on your URL from Twitter is a challenge in its own right. To drive the most clicks and, ultimately, shares, a great headline and opening line are crucial.
Headlines have SEO implications, too: if your blog goes viral, there is a good chance you will begin ranking for the exact term of your headline. (Check out Lakeshore Branding’s post on optimizing your blog’s title tags for more tips.) Competitive keywords like “phone systems” will be hard enough to rank for, without a traditional link building program or campaign, but take, for instance, our blog post on “What Does Google’s Social Search Mean For Your Business?”: we now rank 9th for the term “Google’s Social Search” just because we wrote a unique headline and subsequently received over 140 tweets / retweets. Twitter can definitely play a role in blogging for SEO, which brings me to my next point.
Create a Twitter Following
Without an active community following your updates, Twitter is powerless. Getting more followers simply isn’t enough: you could have 2,000 followers, but if they are all robots, they will never pass as authoritative followers. Getting quality Twitter followers takes a bit of time, but if you cultivate a niche and engage actively with your Twitter community, you’ll be able to minimize the diffusion of your messages.
Quality Content
Create something unique and inimitable. Newsworthy repurposed articles are great every now and then to spice things up a bit, but facts-backed opinions will always hit home with your readers. If you show your blog community that you care about their feedback and interaction, your blog will become more interactive and interesting. (So reply to those comments!)
You can create content that people will use, or you can create entertaining content. Entertaining content has a better chance of going “viral” but useful articles will potentially have a longer mainstay on the web.
Presentation
Ultimately what you are looking to do is make your content shareable and readable. If you present your article with valuable and emotional pictures, you will raise your share-ability. It’s best to look at your blog from a visitor’s perspective and imagine landing on your home page for the first time. Is it attractive? If the answer is no, then change up some design elements to make sure it fits.
About the author: Matt Krautstrunk is an expert writer on everything from social media marketing to document management software based in San Diego, California. He writes for Resource Nation, an online resource that provides document software advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs.