Services
Blogging
Blogs are now critical parts of any organic SEO initiative.
All websites should have a blog for one very simple reason – Search Engines love them! A website can be the most beautifully designed site on the internet, but if search engines aren’t ranking its pages well, the website isn’t going to get any traffic. Because blogs are updated regularly, new web pages are created, and search engines recognize that the website is engaged in the “internet community”. Stagnant sites offering no changes or updates are a dying breed.
While it takes some advanced coding and server knowledge to do the initial setup of a blog, the general operation of a blog doesn’t require more than an intermediate understanding of the internet. The skills for maintaining a blog are not as tech related as much as they are related to writing ability. Still, you don’t need to possess the skills of a professional writer – you just need to be able to write about interesting topics and news stories that will draw in potential customers, or reach whatever audience you’re targeting.
Major search engines consider a wide variety of factors when assigning rankings to web pages, but fresh and unique content are among the most important. Blogging accomplishes both of these things, so it’s no secret that having a blog has become critical to success on the internet. The days of setting up a website and leaving it alone are far behind us.
Blogs play different roles on different websites, but they are perfectly designed for search engine optimization, so every site can realize the benefits. Depending on the type of site, a blog’s topic may be interesting enough to get readers to subscribe to the RSS feed, which ensures they receive all blog updates.
Some sites exist strictly as blogs, so the goal of these sites is usually regular readers. However most other sites aren’t entirely based around a blog, but businesses like retailers, contractors and even restaurants can use them as important supplements to their main website. Again, the SEO benefit is there because the search engines see you that your business or organization is regularly posting new content, but you’re also able to engage readers who visit the website on another level. For example, retailers can announce sales and restaurants can blog about the day’s specials or upcoming events.
There are some sites that maintain a blog that isn’t necessarily the type most people would subscribe to, but the SEO benefits and ability to link to other main site pages play a critical role in the website’s success. For example, businesses like construction companies or electricians should have a blog like any other site, but the regular readership benefit is unlikely because there isn’t a large audience seeking updates on these topics. Website owners should however still maintain these blogs with frequent updates to remind the search engines that new and unique content has been posted so it will be quickly indexed and the search engines will regularly crawl the website.
To capitalize on the SEO benefits of blogs, bloggers have to keep a few things in mind when posting. In addition to tagging and categorizing posts appropriately, bloggers will need to make sure their post titles and content are written in a way that will improve rankings. This means careful consideration will go in to deciding the language used in the content of each post, and writing titles that are both eye catching and keyword rich. These elements of a blog post should be optimized with keywords that the website’s target audience will likely search on the web. Especially for new websites just trying to get some name recognition, blogging about local events and news can be a way to garner some attention and branding.
In addition to automatically notifying blog feed subscribers when new posts are published, RSS feeds can be used to essentially “force” blog search engines to crawl your blog and index new posts. Although you can set up your blog to automatically ping (notify) a number of blog search engines, there are other steps that should be taken to ensure your new blog posts are being pushed quickly to all of the necessary channels, including Google Blog Search. If Google Blog search is picking up and indexing new posts, Google is obviously aware of your updates, which makes quick indexing of your posts in standard organic results all the more likely.
How can VDW help you with blogging?
- Our websites come with easy-to-use blog software, set up and ready to go!
- We will help plan a strategy to make blogging and easy and enjoyable part of the web support process.
- Spending less than 1 hour per week, you can have new fresh content added to your website using the same language and content that you use every day to sell and promote your own business or organization.
Follow / Fan Us