August 22nd, 2010 by Susie

It’s official, having a blog on your site is almost indispensable these days. Google have released their official guide to what constitutes good SEO and it’s confirmed what most search engine optimisation services have known for years – that introducing fresh and original content on a regular basis really helps a site to get onto their results pages.

There aren’t many better platforms for fresh and original content than a blog. So if you’ve decided to run with the in crowd and feature a blog, how are you going to go about it? Do you know all there is to know about making it optimal from an SEO perspective? For the most comprehensive advice you can always consult a professional SEO company, but we’ve put together 22 terrific blog tips so that you can start improving your blog’s chances with the search engines today. Let’s go!

1. Give your blog a personality. It will give users someone to identify with if you put a name and a face to the blog. On a human level we’re more likely to trust the writing of someone who doesn’t hide away in the shadows.

2. Give it some attitude too. Don’t go so far as to upset anyone if you can help it, but if it’s appropriate you might want to make your blog exciting by expressing opinions and not letting it become staid and boring.

3. Update it regularly. As we said in our introduction, it’s fresh content that search engines want to see. For it to be fresh it needs to be updated on a regular basis and so there’s really no room for laziness!

4. Link to it yourself as much as you can. It stands to reason that you’ll want to make your blog as reachable as possible. For that reason, a lot of links are essential.

5. Link to other blogs and join an online community. You’re probably not the only person with your kind of blog content. Instead of seeing absolutely everyone else as competition, why not get involved with other people and their activities. Link to them and leave comments etc. You’ll find you receive a lot of exposure and some new fans.

6. Allow for comments and moderate them regularly. Comments encourage debate and debate encourages exposure. Encourage comments and moderate them to let your audience know that you’re interested in them.

7. Make it attractive to look at. Everyone knows that things ought to be as pleasing to the eyes as possible from a marketing point of view. How it looks will depend on your audience, but whoever they are, keep their taste in mind.

8. Write properly. No one appreciates poor grammar, punctuation and spelling, and they never have.

9. Stick to one topic per post. If you try to do too much your blog will become confusing. Keep it simple to keep their attention.

10. Create an archive and categorise. Allow for easy access of past material. This encourages it to be used and re-read and that means more exposure.

11. Use short paragraphs. They hold people’s attention better.

12. Avoid default layouts. Using a default layout will show that you didn’t put a lot of love into the blog’s creation. Get advice from a good SEO company on layouts that are optimal from an SEO perspective.

13. Design a logo. Having a recognisable logo can help users to recognise you as you and your blog spreads around the web.

14. Make it substantial. Have informative text in blogs. Don’t assume that readers are uninterested in factual texts.

15. Make it topical. Show that the content is fresh by referencing current affairs that will interest readers.

16. Link to it from social media. Social media marketing is one of the cutting edge SEO strategies.

17. Let robots read it. If you have to use Flash etc. feature text as well.

18. Become a member of a network. It’s great exposure.

19. Make sure your pages load quickly. This is important because yours is not the only blog on the web and most users have little patience.

20. Keep your standards high. Remember that quality counts and that if you develop a good fan base there’s no reason why you can’t be successful long term. Think of the most successful sites on the Internet and how they came to be so popular!

Good luck with your blog and remember to get more advice from a good SEO company!

Link to us

If you want to link to this blog, copy and paste the following HTML code to your website.