Many small companies are starting blogs to help bring interest and customers to their website. Without proper planning, oversight and passion for the topic, blogs implemented purely for SEO objectives are doomed to fail. Additionally, social media referrals and recommendations are becoming a notable competitor to search traffic, which can place SEO as a secondary promotional effort in some situations. You have to plan a well-rounded campaign.
Here are three tips for successfully reaping blog benefits in the long run:
1. Find a practical purpose for starting a blog. There are many reasons why companies would benefit from starting and publishing a blog. Some might use blog software as a content management system for an online newsroom or to archive newsletters to the web.
Other blog applications include: aggregating industry news, publishing ongoing product development information, improving customer relations, building through leadership or improving online marketing and sales. Identifying a specific business goal that can be facilitated by the creation, publishing and promotion of blog content should be the first step.
Whether the goal is to better connect with existing customers and reduce support costs or to attract more media coverage, there should be a specific business goal for your blog. SEO can be used to further that objective through improved search visibility.
2. Optimize templates initially and content on an ongoing basis. As dynamically generated web sites, blogs take information stored to a database and push that information through templates that generate the web pages or blog posts we read in a web browser.
Optimization at the template level will pass on benefits to all pages of the blog. For example, the use of post titles in the URLs rather than an id number or posting distinct title tags separate from the on-page titles.
Blog content optimization means finding and utilizing a keyword glossary to allow company blog writers to insert the correct phrases in titles, categories, body copy, anchor text links, tags and images. This is an activity that often gets diluted if there is no editorial review of the blog or persistent attention to the SEO focus.
3. Plan editorial and source content. Traditional publications use planned content to focus their efforts, so why shouldn’t a blog? Use categories as an indication for the topics the blog should be posting about. Category keywords should support the business goals defined in the blog’s objectives.
What are your thoughts on the subject? Have you successfully implemented a company blog?
[...] are plenty of benefits to starting a company blog, including improved search result rankings, increased Web traffic and professional credibility. [...]