Having a blog as part of your website has 3 major SEO benefits that attracts targeted traffic and improve your website rankings. Blog optimization is the process of using each blog posting as part of your website search engine optimization.
Each blog posting adds a new page of keyword rich content to your website. Links from your blog to your web pages using keyword anchor text provide a powerful signal to the search engines. Blogs broadcast their message via RSS across the web and attract more traffic to your website.
How does blog optimization work? How do you tune your blogging for maximum SEO benefit?
Optimize: Your blog should be set-up for maximum SEO benefit. Structurally it should be in a folder rather than on a sub-domain. If your blogging is interesting and original content, it will be linkable. Other bloggers will naturally link to your content. If your blog is placed in a folder (i.e. yourdomain.com/blog), the incoming links will provide link popularity for your entire site. If you place it on a subdomain (i.e. blog.yourdomain.com) the links will only benefit your blog and you lose much of the SEO benefit.
Other steps you can do to optimize your blog are:
- Submit your feed to Feedburner
- Increase the number of update servces (WordPress.org).
- Add SEO plugins to improve SEO structure of each posting.
Plan: Create a master plan or list of which keywords you want to use. These should include all the phrases and variations of those phrases that you would like your website to be found for. Usually this list would be 50 to 200 phrases long because you want both a good topic focus for the search engines and you want enough variety in your blogging for your audience. Blogging from a plan makes it easier to keep on topic.
Writing: Each blog post should be focused on a single keyword phrase. Decide on an interesting topic you want to write about and then select a keyword phrase from your keyword list.
You will want to use the keyword 3 times in each blog posting. Use the keyword phrase once in the blog Title (main headline), once in the first paragraph and once later in the posting. Hyperlink the third usage of the keyword phrase to the most relevant page on your website. This link creates an association that tells the search engines that the page on your website is about that keyword phrase. Can you figure out which phrase this blog posting is optimized around?
You will also want to use your keyword phrase in the tags on your blog posting.
Blog postings should be about 250 words and blogging should be about twice a week. Blog no less often than once per week and no more often than five times per week. If you blog less than once per week you will lose the interest of your audience. If more than 5 times per week you will overwhelm your audience and lose them.
