As SEO experts will tell you, blogs are extremely important. Spiders sent by search engines to look at your site need to see fresh content if you’re to maintain high SEO standards, and a blog offers the perfect platform for such content, and for link building. Another important part of SEO is maintaining an interesting site that the public will want to visit time and again. So anyone with an interest in good SEO will already know the value of a good blog. We’ve put some tips together that we hope will benefit those new to SEO and people with experience alike.
1.Host it Yourself
In order for a blog to bring you the rewards you need, it must be hosted on your own domain. If it’s not hosted on your own domain, analysts would agree that you’re wasting a critical opportunity to win vital points with search engines. So resist the temptation to make use free hosting services, as you’ll be giving away benefits brought by popularising your own links.
2.RSS Feeds
All blogs need to have an RSS feed. RSS feeds allow blogs to be syndicated easily. Syndication results in links back to a blog from RSS directories. Blog entries ought to be made available through an RSS feed so that visitors can be notified when new entries are added. If interested by the titles they see it’s easy for them to click on a link directly to your website.
3.Maximise the Potential of White Space
Never forget that spider programs sent by search engines need to be able to scan text in your blog to know that it’s there and to appreciate keywords that are included. Similarly, readers of your blog will often ‘scan’ the text for items that are of interest to them. Rather than read the entry from beginning to end, they will quickly look it over. With this in mind, you should use short paragraphs and avoid overly long entries that are likely to bore readers. Resist the urge to fill the text with unnecessary keywords or irrelevant text.
4.Remember That Titles are Important
With so much information on the web, indeed a never-ending supply, you only have the shortest margin of time in which to grab the attention of visitors and draw readers to your new text. White space can be used to good effect for text buffering and titles can be emboldened for highlighting purposes.
5.Grammar Really Matters
You will be judged by the quality of writing on your site. This is an inescapable fact. Search engines take notice of sites that lack proper punctuation or capitalisation. If your blog fails to respect the conventions of grammar then search engines could assume that blog posts on your site consist of unoriginal material and punish you accordingly.
6.Make it Legible
As with any content you place on your site, you’ll want it to reflect the standards you wish to advertise. Using the wrong fonts, colours, sizes, etc. can all have a detrimental effect and make the whole page look messy. As a rule, don’t allow text to be obscured by pictures or anything else, and try to maintain a look that’s pleasing to the eye and not too controversial in terms of taste.
7.Think About Navigation
It’s very important that visitors are given access to useful links away from the blog and beneficial places to go. If links are included in the actual blog post then you’ll have useful backlinks if the RSS feed gets syndicated.
8.Communicate Effectively
If the subject of your post is pertinent to others, inform them. This can bring about valuable links in your direction and added exposure through dialogue with other sites on the web. Remember though, a pre-occupation with mentioning popular blogs or sites will not necessarily result in links back to your site. The content has to be interesting enough to get attention.
9.Use SEO
Make sure blog posts are written in the same way as web copy. Incorporate keywords but get advice from search engine optimization experts about the best ways to do this. Think about reaping the benefits of a free search engine optimization analysis, which will tell you about SEO Content Management Systems that can increase the effectiveness of your blog as well as other important aspects of SEO such as link building.
10.Think About Speed
Users do, so make sure pages load quickly.
Happy blogging.