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There are literally hundreds-of-millions of blogs in the digital world; and that number continues to grow dramatically each year. But as you can imagine, the page views of these individual blogs vary drastically. A large bulk of blogs go mostly unread, while others attract thousands of pageviews a day. The trick to developing readership and a loyal fan base is to first post relevant and engaging content and then effectively direct people to your blog so they read it. So you have got the great content; but how do you get the online community to read it? First and foremost, you must apply — you guessed it — Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
SEO is what search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo use to find and rank search results based on what they deem to be relevancy. And while each search engine employs slightly different algorithms, they all essentially work the same way.
How do we apply SEO to our blogs?
- Identify one or two long-tail keywords that are relevant to your reader. Remember, your keywords have to be specific to your reader.
- Include those keywords throughout your blog post. There are four key areas where you should include your keywords – title tag, headers and body, the URL and the meta description.
- Make your blog mobile friendly. There is nothing that will turn a cell phone or tablet user away from your blog faster than a clunky layout designed for a computer screen. Cell phone users can rake up massive amounts of pageviews for mobile friendly sites and dramatically affect SEO rankings.
- Add links to other content on your site. By adding links to other posts on your blog, you entice readers to stay on your site, which signals to search engines that your content is relevant.
- Blast your posts on social media. Be sure to post links to your blog on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and anywhere else that is relevant to your business.
- Use Google reports. Run a Google Search Analytics Report to learn the keywords and other content people are clicking on as it relates to your topic. Use this information to see what is working and what isn’t.
Remember, SEO is not a perfect science. And those keywords that work today, might not be trending tomorrow.
It is important to stay on top of your blog’s performance. If you are writing strong content but not attracting pageviews, comments and shares, then something isn’t working; and it is even more essential to wield the substantial power of SEO.
By Blair Koch
