Keeping your website up to date with relevant content is a great way to improve and sustain your search engine rankings, and one way to do this is through a finely tuned blog.
Countless websites will produce monthly, weekly, or even daily blog content to stay relevant to Google’s algorithm (in fact, you’re reading one of those articles right now), but what are these blog articles actually doing for your website? Let’s dive into a few of the elements you’ll find in the standard blog article, and explore why they’re beneficial to your search engine optimization (SEO) performance.
Keyword Integration
Perhaps the most important benefit of creating blog articles for your website comes from keyword integration. Every brand has thousands of terms that they want to rank for, and integrating select keywords into blog content is one of many ways for them to improve their search engine rankings.
The first step, of course, is using keyword research tools to determine the best words or phrases to integrate. Try picking keywords that are both relevant to your blog topic and are being regularly searched by your target audience. I recommend using Google’s Keyword Planner to gauge popularity.
Once you’ve chosen your keywords, try finding ways to integrate them into the blog as naturally as you can. Overcrowding your text with the same keyword over and over again will not help your post rank organically and can actually hurt it, so be careful not to go overboard!
With this crucial step in blogging, each post has the opportunity to be ranked higher for your selected keywords or phrases. This means that when Google and other search engines crawl your website and find multiple, natural — not forced or stuffed — instances of those key phrases, your site will be perceived algorithmically as a more relevant source.
Internal Linking
The act of interlinking is simply taking the URL of one of your web pages and inserting it into the HTML to form a link somewhere else on the website. Optimizing navigation and other interlinking structures is a powerful SEO strategy for your entire website, not just your blogs. Whenever relevant, try linking to your website’s product or services pages, or even other blog articles. (See what I did there?)
Interlinking the pages of your website improves search engine crawl efficiency, flows more link authority to those pages, and drives customers to pages that are more likely to cause them to convert.
Additionally, interlinking will also have an effect on keyword relevancy. By customizing the anchor text used for your internal link, Google will get a clear message that the page being linked to is highly relevant to the word or phrase in the anchor text.
Relevant Content
While it may seem obvious to some, make sure that your blog content is relevant to your brand. Posting articles about irrelevant topics just dilutes the overall contextual relevance of your blog and your site. In addition, it draws traffic that won’t convert for you. For example, if a clothing brand suddenly posts an article about creatures in the Pacific Ocean, it’s highly unlikely that their brand will suddenly start ranking for aquatic keywords.
Try brainstorming blog topics that are relevant to your brand while still differentiating from your previous blog articles. By producing brand-appropriate blog content with relevant keywords, Google and other search engines will recognize your brand as a dependable source of authoritative content.
External Links
Perhaps even more important than its role in driving readers to your site, however, are the links your blog articles can attract from other sites. Interlinking is important, yes, but external links are search engines’ primary method of determining a site’s authority. That, combined with content relevance, is the core of the algorithms search engines use to rank content in the search results.
Blogging is not for the faint of heart. It takes time and dedication to think of great topics, and then write and post them. In the beginning, the returns will be small as your blog finds its readership. Over time, and with consistent social media and email newsletter promotion, however, your blog can grow into a powerful force for your SEO program.
