You may be thinking, “Does blogging help with SEO?” The short answer is yes! There are several factors that help your SEO ranking that come from having a blog on your website. However, just having a blog won’t raise your rankings. There are strategies that go into writing blog posts that will help your SEO ranking. Keep reading to find out how you can employ best blogging practices to help improve SEO.
Understanding Search Engines
When search engine bots “crawl” through a website, they are reading, analyzing, and understanding the content of your site. After search engines are done looking through your site, they will rank it based on several factors and rank it against other sites with similar content. One of the major factors search engines look for is quality content, and the main way people have quality content on their website is through a blog. There are several strategies that go into creating quality blog content, so just writing a post and hoping it does well won’t get you the top SEO ranking you want. Blog posts that use SEO tactics are more likely to rank higher on search engines. These blogs that meet the needs of searchers are considered reliable sources, which lead to higher rankings in search engines.
Targeting Relevant Keywords
A major reason people have blogs on their websites is to target keywords. When you write a blog post, you want it to be centered around a specific keyword or phrase. Search engines use these keywords to pull the most relevant pages as people search for them. How do you know what people are looking for? This is where keyword research comes in. You may have an idea for a blog post, but you’ll want to know what keywords people are using to search for the topic before you write it. By using these keywords strategically throughout your post, it will be more likely to rank for those keywords.
Including Quality Links
Another way having a blog helps with SEO is creating opportunities for internal linking. Internal links are important when it comes to SEO because it helps Google understand how your website is structured. On typical landing pages, you won’t have enough content or reason to link to another page on your website. A blog, however, will become a wealth of written content and provide many more opportunities to create internal links.
Not only do you want to be able to have good internal links, you also want your blog to be used with external links (also referred to as “backlinking”). If other people who are writing blogs or articles think you have good information and link back to your blog, your SEO rankings will be more likely to rise.
Providing Current Information
A blog keeps your website current. Search engines are typically looking for fresh, new content, and when you have a blog, you should be publishing new content on a consistent basis. Think about it: if you’re looking for information, are you more likely to click on a recent article or an article that was published years ago? People want current information since it is most likely as accurate as possible. Plus, search engines favor websites that actively add information to their site.
Increasing Time Spent on Your Site
A blog is a great way to keep people on your website longer. If you have a blog that takes about 3 to 5 minutes to read, the person looking for information will stay on your website longer. If someone comes to your site and almost immediately leaves because they didn’t find the information they were looking for, Google sees that and thinks your website isn’t as relevant as they thought, which pushes you farther down in rankings. The longer someone stays on your site, the better in Google’s eyes.
BONUS: If you’re including relevant internal links to other blog posts or pages on your site, you can exponentially increase the time users spend with your content as they explore those links
Using Different Forms of Media
Another way a blog helps with SEO is being able to use several different forms of media. You can add images to your blog, which makes the post more visually interesting and breaks up huge walls of texts but also helps with SEO ranking. Images should be properly tagged with alt text, and although Google can’t understand the relevance of the image, it can recognize and crawl the alt text. Videos serve the same purpose, as well as keeping people on your blog page for longer periods of time.
Now you know blogging really does help with SEO! When you use the best practices presented here, blogging can earn you top rankings for keywords you want to target, and most importantly, it will help your customers! Want to learn more about having a blog on your website? Contact us today, and we can talk about starting your blog!
