Neglecting to optimize for search
WHAT’S THE MISTAKE
You’re not actively doing anything to take advantage of your blog’s power to help you get found in search engines.
WHY IS HURTS
As we hinted in Marketing Mistake 1 (Not Integrating Your Blog With Your Main Website), one of the greatest benefits of business blogging relates to search engine optimization. If you’re not consciously acting on the various ways to optimize your blog for search engines, you’re missing out on a tremendous opportunity your blog can offer to increase your keyword rankings and grow your organic search traffic.
EASY FIX
The number of terms that a website can rank for is directly related to the size of the site. More often than not, the difference between a 50-page website and a 500+ page site is a blog. Because of this, blogging is an absolutely essential practice for SEO and traffic-building. More indexed pages mean more opportunities for keywords, so developan SEO strategy for your blog and implement that strategy for every piece of content you create and publish on your blog.
Step 1: identify your keywords :
Remember back in Mistake #4 (Posting Off-Topic Content) when we suggested brainstorming keywords to help determine a topic for your blog? This same practice is an important step in developing your blog’s SEO strategy. Keep in mind that the more general a keyword is, the more difficult it will be to rank for (e.g. the head term “blogging” would be more difficult to rank for than the longtail keywords “how to use a blog”). Use Google’s free Keyword Tool, which offers insight into the competitiveness of a specific keyword, to help you choose realistic keywords related to your blog’s topic.
Step 2: optimize blog content with those keywords :
The most important places to include keywords on any page of your site are in the page title, the URL, and the H1 (Header) tag (or in your blog’s case, this usually means your blog title). This means that if you’re trying to rank for the keywords “how to use a blog,” you need to make sure to use that phrase in that order in all three places. You also need to make sure that this phrase appears up front. A common mistake is for a company to put its name before its keywords in page titles (e.g. HubSpot | How to Use a Blog). Instead, you should write: How to Use a Blog | HubSpot.
No comments:
Post a Comment