How To SEO Your Blog
Most business these days recognize the importance of having a good website, but that doesn’t mean you have a good internet presence. There are many different ways you can improve your internet presence but few are as important as maintaining a good blog. To illustrate why a blog is important think of a refrigerator.
Google Likes Fresh Food
Pretend Google is a good friend of your that your trying to make comfortable during Google’s vist by saying, “my house is your house.” Now if you’re going to say something like that you need to make sure your fridge is stocked up with drinks and munchies in case Google gets hungry. Well, Google goes to the fridge and finds it stocked with all the food he likes, and in turn makes you look good. Now imagine Google comes back over a month later, gets hungry, asks if he can get something to eat and finds that the fridge has the same old food that is covered in month old mold! Yikes! Google isn’t coming back anytime soon.
Your website is similar to the fridge, you want it to be stocked with all sorts of good new content for it to crawl and index. But if your website has just been sitting there for about a year with nothing new on it then you’re going to give Google the impression that you don’t care. If you don’t have new content, than Google is assuming you have nothing really to add to the current trending topics. As such, your competition has a great blog with new content on a weekly, if not daily basis and the result is Google loves visiting their site instead of yours. In the long run you start seeing your website rankings drop because you’re giving Google the impression that your website is irrelevant to today’s topics.
So what else can you do to make your website blog attractive, besides writing on topics that are relevant to your niche?
Keyword Your Blog!
When you write your next blog article it’s important to use long-tail keywords that help describe the content being written about. You don’t want to do more than two because if you’re just stuffing your content with keywords Google will pick up on that like a friend saying, “see, I got you your favorite ice cream … won’t you be my friend?” Long tail keywords are usually 3-6 word phrases that visitors are most likely to type when searching for specific content. Use these keyword phrases in your blog title, the body, in the URL and in your meta description for best results.
Ready for Mobile?
Blogs that are responsive will automatically resize themselves on any screen size. So, for example, if a visitor finds your blog on their desktop they expect it to fill the screen, but if they go to their iPhone they expect the website to be appropriately proportioned to fit on the screen without having to do a lot of zooming. Another reason you want your website to be responsive is because more of the internet’s traffic is coming from mobile platforms. In fact, Google is saying by the end of the year the majority of traffic will come from iPhones, iPads and other smart devices.
Optimize Your Photos
When Google crawls your blog content they’re looking for more than just words, they’re also looking for images. Specifically, its looking for image alt text. You know when you move your cursor over on an image and the little bit of text pops up? That text is what helps Google understand what it’s looking at since it doesn’t actually have eyes to figure out what the image is. So if you cater to Google and insert your image alt tags in your photos you will more than likely gain the favor of Google, especially if you can throw in some of your keywords.
