The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article: May 2008, Volume 7, Issue 5
6 SEO Tips to Increase Traffic to Your Blog
by Cabral Thomas, Search Marketing Analyst, iProspect
A corporate blog can serve as an integral part of your company's branding
strategy. As it gains visibility for relevant search engine queries and
drives traffic to your website, it can significantly increase your share of
voice. And today, with the advent of blended search, blogs hold even more
promise as now a general search can just as likely return a blog, image, or
news result as it can a Web page. However, if a blog isn't continually
optimized for search, its potential will fall short.
To fully capitalize on your blog, make sure it is optimized to maximize its
search engine traffic. Below are a few tips to help you do just that.
Add tags to your posts.
A single blog post may not be strong enough to rank on its own, but tagstags
can help remedy that. They provide a convenient way to group together blog
posts with related content. When related posts are grouped together with
tags, the "tag page" may have a stronger chance of ranking.
Vary the title tag and URL from the post title.
Some of the more common blog platforms use the exact post title for the title
tag and URL. Varying the title tag and URL allows you to target keyword
variations and eliminate words from the post title which are irrelevant
from a search point of view.
Create and submit a sitemap file.
You may be thinking !wait a minute, our blog already has a sitemap page." Well,
while that is great for users, it doesn't necessarily mean that search engine
spiders will crawl every relevant page. This is where XML Sitemaps come in. Created
specifically for search engines, an XML Sitemap contains a list of every relevant
page on your site. Submitting your sitemap file to the engines will help ensure
these pages are crawled and let you know of any pages with crawlability issues.
Link from the main corporate site to the blog.
The simplest of these six tips, this one is often overlooked. A link from your
corporate home page to your blog gives your blog additional relevancy in search
engines. Or in Google’s words: “Votes cast by pages that are themselves 'important'
weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."'
Link to previous posts.
When writing a new post, see if it relates to a prior entry. If so, reference the
previous post via a link within the body of the new post. And in the process, make
sure to optimize the anchor text of the link as it factors in to page relevancy.
Analyze your site statistics (and act!).
Every user who interacts with your site is giving you valuable information. But
it is up to you to collect, analyze, and act on that information. You need to dig
into the data. For instance, what keyword phrases drive the most traffic? What
tag pages are most popular? What percent of visitors go to the main corporate
website from your blog? The answers to all these questions and more will help
you determine what content resonates most with your audience.
Today, blogs offer marketers numerous benefits, but without ongoing
optimization, their potential will fall short. Smart marketers will
ensure their blog is fully optimized to maximize its search engine
traffic. Failing to do so is tantamount to ceding your share of
voice to your competitors.
