Why is Search Engine Optimization Important for Blogs?

In this article, I’ll explain why search engine optimization is important for business blogs. Then I’ll give you a list of proven techniques you can use to optimize your blog for better search engine visibility.

You spend many hours each month publishing new content to your blog. You put your heart and soul into it. You work hard to make the content useful for your target audience.

Then you take a look at your website analytics program and find out that you’ve only had a handful of visitors for the month. What could be more disappointing than that.

This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes into the picture. Despite what you may have heard, SEO does not involve any kind of advanced web programming. It’s a soft skill, not a hard technical skill. In fact, most of SEO revolves around two things — content and links. So let’s talk about why search engine optimization is important for your business blog, and what you can do to achieve it.

Why Blog Optimization is Important to You

If you’re publishing a business blog that serves some kind of marketing purpose (and I can assume you are, since you’re here on this site), search engine optimization is very important to you. At least it should be. Blog SEO is a technique you can use to increase the number of visitors to your business blog. This in turn can lead to more exposure, awareness, business leads, and even direct sales.

Search engine optimization is important for other business reasons as well. If you go through the proper SEO steps to optimize your blog, you’ll also be doing some valuable research along the way. You’ll conduct keyword research to find out how your potential customers are using the search engines. This gives you some insight into their thought process, and it also helps you broaden your content / publishing scope.

As part of a search engine optimization process, you should also research other websites in your niche, to see what’s out there in the way of partnerships and competition. This is another SEO technique that’s good for general business purposes as well.

So after all this, I think you can clearly see why search engine optimization is important for business bloggers. The next question is, how do you achieve it? Here’s your answer…

Brandon’s Tips for Search Engine Optimization

Let me start this section with a short bio, just to let you know where I’m coming from in terms of SEO credentials. I’ve spent the last seven years practicing search engine optimization in some form or another. I was the SEO guy for an Internet marketing company in Texas (Intra-Focus), and I later started my own SEO firm in the Austin area. I’ve also written several e-books and hundreds of articles on this subject. Most importantly, I practice these skills on a daily basis, across the 30+ websites I manage.

Here’s what I’ve learned about search engine optimization for blogs in that time. If you’re looking for ways to improve your rankings the right way (without being hit with a Google penalty), here’s how to do it:

• Let’s start at the beginning and assume you’re starting a blog from scratch, and that you need to register a domain name. You should ignore all of the “expert” advice that tells you to get a domain name with keywords in it for SEO purposes. This is bad business. Search engines are the last thing you should consider when choosing your domain. You should consider business branding and memorability when choosing a website domain name — but not search engine optimization.
• If you haven’t done so already, conduct a thorough round of keyword research before you start blogging. This will help you build a content plan and create purposeful (instead of random) content. Depending on the type of business you are in, this process might take a couple hours or a couple of days. But it’s important for proper search engine optimization, among other things, so do it!
• Start publishing new content on a regular basis. If you manage one new blog post every week, that’s a great place to start. If you can blog several times a week, that’s even better. Here are some 15 blog entry ideas to keep you going. You can find some more ideas here.
• When creating your blog posts, refer back to (A) your list of key phrases and (B) the content plan you developed from that list. When you write a blog entry for the first time, forget about the search engines and write for people — i.e., your real audience. When you’re done with the post, go back through and optimize the entry for search engine visibility.
• When you are optimizing your blog entries, pay particular attention to the title you create for each post. Your blogging program will use the title you create for the HTML title tag as well, and this is important for search engine optimization and visibility. Put keywords in your titles, and make them descriptive and relevant to the post that follows. Here are some tips on adjusting WordPress title tags for SEO purposes. You can make similar adjustments in Blogger, TypePad or any other blog program.

Now Let’s Talk About Link Popularity

If you go through the steps above, you’ll be taking care of half of the search engine optimization picture. You’ll have a blog full of quality, keyword-rich content, and you’ll have new content coming online each week. You’re off to a great start. But now you need the other main component of search engine optimization. You need to build up some link popularity to boost your rankings even more.

Link popularity refers to the quantity and quality of other websites that link to your website. Why is it important for search engine optimization and rankings? Because Google, Yahoo and other search engines view links as “votes” toward a website’s popularity — and they rank websites based on popularity and relevance. Because of this, a cottage industry of “link building companies” has emerged. But you should avoid these companies like the plague, because most of them only know enough to be dangerous.

The best strategy for building link popularity is to focus on creating great content. If you blog on a regular basis, and you create truly useful content, you’ll have the kind of blog that naturally attracts links. This is the most important concept of search engine optimization I want you to take away from this article. It’s so important that I’ve written a separate piece on building link popularity over at my SEO website.

Here are some more tips for getting links from other bloggers and webmasters:

• Wait until your blog deserves links, before you go out looking for them. Nobody wants to link to a bare-boned website with very little of content. But if you have plenty of useful / interesting / entertaining content, you’ll also have a better chance of acquiring links. People will want to recommend your blog to their own readers, and that’s the key to success.
• Strive to create the kind of blog that outshines others in your industry or niche. Offer plenty of freebies (tutorials, tip sheets, downloads, etc.). Once you have these things in place, distribute a press release online to announce your blog. Send that same release to industry journals and websites within your field. This will help you generate traffic as well as links.
• Consider submitting your blog to other directories as well. You can find hundreds of them online with a bit of Google research.
• Repurpose your blog content to create articles, and then publish those articles online with a link back to your blog. You can use article publishing sites like EzineArticles.com, or (even better) submit the articles to a select list of websites within your industry. Include a link to your blog within the author’s note of each article.

Well, I think we’ve covered most of the bases here. Now you know why search engine optimization is important for business blogs, and you also know how to achieve it. Here’s a similar article on blog ranking success you might want to check out, if you’re serious about this topic.