Let’s face it: blog writing can be hard work. Writing an occasional blurb here and there is one thing. Writing, editing, and finding legal photos on a consistent, every-day basis can be tedious and very time consuming. Most blog posts don’t take five minutes: they can take hours at a time to be of high quality.
Therefore, for all the hard work involved, it would make sense for each article to drive organic traffic to your website. Otherwise, writing each article without a strategy in mind would be equivalent to aimlessly throwing mud at a wall and hoping some of it would stick. It would also be helpful to know that blog writing brings long-term results, and is NOT a way to get rich quick.
Here are some tips to get the most out of your blog articles and help ensure that more people will visit your website organically through search engines:
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Perform Keyword Research on High-Traffic Industry Words and Phrases
Forecasting what people are searching for will give you the upper hand with what to write about. Focus on those specific keywords.
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Write Articles of Interest
Writing articles that are interesting to the masses will not only increase the chances that readers will want to read more content on your site, but that they may revisit your blog at another time and even refer certain posts to friends.
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Inbound Links
Creating related links to other pages of your blog inside the articles will not only give readers more interest to browse through other elements of your site, it also helps the search engines index your website better. Don’t knock it.
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Outbound Links
SearchEngineLand posted that, while good content is a must, realize, at the same time, that content alone won’t boost you into the “top 10” for any remotely relevant phrase terms. In its words, “Shakespeare wouldn’t rank for ‘Alas, poor Yorick’ (56,000 results) without a little help.” Networking with other business and requesting them to link back to you in articles that they write is crucial to increasing both your site relevancy and page rank for all search engine results.
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Do NOT Copy/Paste Articles from Other Websites
This is not to be taken lightly. We know of specific cases where a website would copy blog content straight off of other websites hoping to get SEO value for that content. Recently, RISE Interactive (not related to us) reported that one of their blog posts was copied straight from them and translated directly into Japanese. In their words,
“Google says when it comes across duplicate content they group all the URLs together. They then select what they think is the ‘best URL’ to represent the content in search queries.”
This chart from Elliance brilliantly shows how Google determines duplicate content:
The search engines aren’t stupid. They have plagiarism checkers, and the more original an article is, the better value it will get. On the flip side, enough plagiarized content will drop any SEO value the website has like an anchor in the sea. Also, should the content be copyrighted by the original website, there’s nothing stopping that company from suing for copyright infringement.
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Tag, Tag, Tag
It is important to place top keyword terms, located in the blog article, inside the title, keyword, and description mets tags. This gives the article more SEO value. Any serious search result will show the search term located in the title tag, as shown:
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Always Have Fresh Content Available
If your website, say, shoots out a ton of articles one day and does nothing for an entire month, the search engine bots take notice and don’t treat your website with the same amount of respect it would had the articles been published on a rotating, every-other-day basis. Write a lot of articles, but publish them on a rotating basis so that a) you don’t need to pressure yourself to do too much writing, and b) the search engine bots recognize your website as constantly distributing fresh content.
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Add Social Media Buttons to Site
Today, everybody “does” Social Media. The amount of people visiting sites like Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, and Digg are in the hundreds of millions, and this number is constantly growing. Adding Social Media buttons to your blog pages allows one to just share or vote an article on a Social Media medium of choice. This in turn lets friends and “fans” see the URL that was just shared and, out of curiosity, they too will read the post, share with their friends, and so on. The potential to market your website and blog to such a large audience makes it unreasonable not to do so.
Recently, Again, blog writing is long and tedious. This article alone took a good 3 hours to draft! However, it keeps your users engaged and coming back to your site. And, using the strategies listed above will increase the chances of people visiting your website organically.
