Five Effective SEO Strategies to Optimize Your Business Blog
Source: AJ Kumar
So you've started a business blog, providing authoritative insights about the latest news and most pressing issues in your industry. With such great content, your blog should be raising your company's profile and generating more customers. That is, of course, if anyone is actually reading it.
The trouble with blogging is that having great content isn't always enough. You also have to keep search engine optimization in mind, and make your blog attractive to the biggest search engines to drive real traffic.
Here are five tips to help you optimize your business blog for search:
1. Conduct keyword research.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make with your business blog is to fail to include appropriate keywords in your posts. Every post is an opportunity to get noticed by search engines for a new set of keywords.
What makes a good keyword? Ideally, your blog posts should focus on long-tail keywords, such as "Sony Cybershot digital camera" or "Barack Obama action figure." Good keywords should generate a small, but well-targeted amount of search traffic, including at least 500 exact match searches each month. They also shouldn't be too common and too competitive with more popular blogs and websites.
Related: 10 Ways to Turn Your Blog into a Lead-Generation Machine
To determine whether a keyword has too much competition, first install a free browser toolbar -- such as SEOBook's SEO for Firefox plugin -- that displays information about each site in the Google results pages whenever you search for your target keyword. Then take a look at the latest Google Top 10 results for your target word or phrase. If you see a lot of highly-ranked sites with many backlinks pointing to each page, your chosen keyword might be too competitive.
2. Build quality backlinks.
Backlinks play a crucial role in search by acting as "votes of confidence" for every page on your website. If you have plenty of high quality, relevant sites linking back to your page, it shows the search engines that your blog is also high quality.
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