How to jumpstart the SEO of your business blog

We all know that SEO has been a huge hit with many big and small businesses that has made their attempt in the online world. And many of them have well been trying to manage and optimize a business blog. Why? Well, isn’t it obvious?

When the art of writing became a business need

If you’re a business and you’ve stuck around for a year or two in the internet, you’d know that you need a blog simply because a blog is one of the best ways to keep up information with your customers while generating possible linkbait content at the same time.

A website that doesn’t move is a stale website. It’s static and the information that can be found in it will be kept just as it is until the a decision to maintain or revamp it happens.

A website with a blog keeps on moving. It constantly updates with new information and content – but you have to make sure that the users WANT that information, and that it is, in fact, informative. Otherwise, it’s pretty useless – aside from it’s SEO benefits. (There are lots of sites that can give you great blogging tips)

When the internet became overpopulated

Information is everywhere in the internet. You can find almost anything using search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines out there. The internet is a mega database of information. And search is the one which organizes that mega database. Just imagine, what will the internet be without search?

That’s right! Encyclopedias will come back to life.

On top of all those information, you happen to have the best blog there is about a certain niche which your business caters to. It updates every day with new, juicy and exceptionally made content. But there’s one problem – you’re competing with the pool of overpopulated information roaming around the internet.

One word comes to mind

SEO

Well actually it’s three words but anyway it’s almost a word now. Give it a little more time and Webster will include it in his dictionary. Then give it a little more time and the internet would have already replaced Webster’s dictionary – with Webster’s online dictionary. Oh heck, it already exists.

Anyhow, going back to the topic (sorry for that. I got carried away) here are five simple tips to jumpstart the SEO of your business blog:

Pick your poison

I don’t really mean poison. Did I say poison? I meant keyword

You have to know what keyword you want to rank for. Let’s use Problogger for example – people search for the keywords ‘problogging’ and ‘problogger tips’ or something like that even if they don’t know the brand Problogger exists and is, indeed, a blog about Problogging. You have to know the keyword or keyphrase you want to build your blog on and work on it.

Don’t be a trigger-happy blogger

Trigger-happy bloggers are the ones who love the publish button. They just want their articles to get out there and attract some readers. This isn’t the way to go. Why? Because when you publish something you have to make sure that it’s the best it can be (or at least what you can make it to be). Once your article is out – it’s out. It’ll get indexed, be used for retrieval in SERPs and will be used to help rank your site.

An article that is well-written and well-optimized is gold. It’s the thing that will keep your blog running strong. It’s linkbait, keyword power, content relevance, authority and what have you. It’s the key to your SEO – you don’t want an ugly key do you? Good, cause your readers don’t like ugly keys as well.

Don’t hoard your juice

Linking out to other sites and blogs that are related to yours might give you the impression that you’re giving away your Google juice to them. Well this is true BUT in this way, they’ll also recognize you. Linking out to other related sites does you more good than you think. First-off, your readers would see that you know your resource. They will recognize that your authority comes from a mixture of several different excellent and trustworthy sites (assuming that they are and you’re wise enough to pick them out)

Secondly, The webmasters and siteowners that you link out to will eventually notice that some of their traffic is coming from you. They’ll probably check you out, and voila, they’ll probably link back to you. Notice the ‘probably’s’ I included? Because I can’t guarantee them linking back to you UNLESS you have a goldmine of content that caught their attention (which brings you back to my second tip)

Get SEO plugins

Plugins are one of the best inventions ever made – ever. Did I say ever? Yes I did say ever. Don’t believe me? Try it out for yourself. I highly recommend the All in one SEO plugin for WordPress. Don’t use WordPress? Well you better. It’s simply the best CMS around and I’m not being paid to promote them – no, not a cent.

Go look in my best buddy, Google for plugins that you can use for your CMS. It helps in speeding up your settings for your title, meta keywords and meta description. It can save you a lot of time, effort and HTML code reading.

These are just some of the things you can do to jumpstart the SEO of your business blog. There are tons of ways to do it, but nothing beats the basics like the basics.

Tips for Keeps: for Keyword research, you can use Keywordspy and Wordtracker. Those two are very effective tools for you to know if the keywords you want are being searched for.