To ensure your blog adds value to your website, you need to understand its purpose. In general terms, blogging is a great way to provide new content, to showcase your expertise and of course to engage with your target market. The information must be relevant to your products or services and it should include well-researched keywords. Inserting relevant keywords ‘intelligently’ will improve SEO, and this means that your website or web shop can score higher in organic search rankings.  

EXPERT IN YOUR FIELD

As touched upon earlier, by providing original interesting articles covering your specific area of expertise,  you not only produce fresh content but also set yourself up as an authority within your field.  Pretty soon, you could have regular readers who look forward to your latest blogs.

TECHNICAL SEO

Your blog may be beautifully written but if it isn’t optimised, most people will be blissfully unaware of its existence. So, it is necessary to both optimise your website technically, so that the ‘crawlers’ can read it. It’s also crucial that your blog complies with all the necessary SEO rules, as this will influence your website’s SEO score and how easy it will be to find.

The good news is that if you follow some tried and tested steps you can improve the visibility of your content, this can then increase your traffic which is essential to drive those all-important leads.

IDENTIFY YOUR PURPOSE AND YOUR AUDIENCE

You can make life easier for yourself (and your readers) if you establish what you want to achieve and who you want to reach. The tone of voice and type of language will be different if you are writing for those who have no prior knowledge of your product than imparting news to experts.

KEYWORD RESEARCH

Contrary to popular belief, you cannot just decide which keywords you would like to use, identifying the correct keywords and phrases needs to be based upon research. Ideally you need to strategically include keywords with a high search volume but not too much competition in to your blog text. The keywords must be relevant in order to help your website’s ranking.

A word of warning, anyone who thinks that it will help to stuff your content with nonsensical keywords and links will have a rude awakening. This type of behaviour is not tolerated by search engines and your ranking will be adversely affected.

RELEVANT SUBJECT MATTER

Another important consideration is how your subject matter relates to your business. If you write about something that will be of interest to your target audience, they will be looking for it.

LINKS

Google also prefers pages with links (both internal and external), as long as they are linking to interesting related content. Even more valuable are links to your site from other websites. If Google sees that other websites are linking to you, they will take it as a sign of an authoritative website and rank it accordingly. But, before you go out trying to find websites to link to you, this must be done very carefully. The website linking to you must be a good quality website and there must be a relevant reason for them to link to you. Google will actually penalise a website that has, where it detects what it refers to as ‘toxic back links’

META DESCRIPTIONS

The meta description is a HTML meta tag that you can add to any page. Its purpose is to provide a short description of your article for search engines and other crawlers.

There is a school of thought that thinks meta description tags are no longer relevant on blogs, but we disagree. We recommend meta descriptions are included– as long as they are good. The right meta-description is great for summarising the article and it will also be displayed on social media when the article is shared.  

OPTIMISE IMAGES AND VIDEOS

The better your content, the more engaging it will be and this means higher ranking. Images and videos are far more interesting and engaging than plain old text, they should definitely feature in all blogs. But be careful, when using images, make sure you are not infringing any copyright.

Now that we’ve established that we need images, we must optimise the images for SEO and speed, to ensure the quickest load time for the best user experience. It is also advised to use a title and Alt Text, an HTML image tag to describe the type of image, which is required to help search engines understand the content and for visually impaired users relying on sound.

SUBJECT – MAKE IT INTERESTING

Finally, no one is going to give a damn about the content if the title doesn’t entice them to start reading or if they can’t find it.   A good title is vital for search engine ranking, so don’t forget to use keywords!

If your business, real estate or otherwise, is struggling with your marketing get in touch with Redline Company for a free business clinic. In one hour, our marketing professionals will give you some advice and ideas to boost your strategy.