This is a guest post from Felix over at Teapot Creative. They do all kinds of stuff for your website like design and SEO services. The team there seems to be hyped up on tea and enthusiasm, and I love that!
A well written, regularly updated blog is one of the most effective tools in the content creation tool kit. By simply adding fresh, interesting material to your blog on a regular basis, you can attract new visitors, increase hits and significantly boost your websites visibility to the various search engines.
The search engines prioritize sites that add new content regularly over those that remain static and the more useful content you add to your site; the more likely it is that it will be found by people when using the search engines to find the product or service they are interested in.
For the majority of website owners the easiest way to improve their search engine position is by creating and developing a great blog to express the personality and style of their business and compliment their website.
Once your blog has established a reputation for itself and your readers begin to share posts with others online and talk about it, you will see a marked increase in the hit rate to the website itself. Whilst this can take a little time and patience to build, we have experienced for ourselves the way our hit rates can suddenly increase drastically thanks to blogging.
Perhaps your business website does not currently have a blog, or maybe you have one, but have not quite got your head round the whole blogging process and want to know how to get more out of your blog. Well, hopefully this handy guide will point you in the right direction and help you to do just that!
What To Write?
Your posts obviously need to be relevant to and compliment the content of your website, but there is no need to restrict yourself too much, or you will run the risk of your blog becoming boring for your readers. Even if the business you are in means you are writing about topics that are not particularly exciting, you will need to find ways to make them interesting, engaging, and informative in order to hold the attention of your audience.
A great tip is to write about things you are passionate about, inject a little humor, drop in the odd piece of random content here and there, use your imagination and have fun with it!
Different topics and posts will appeal to different people, increasing your blog traffic, in addition to increasing the quantity of your main websites traffic. The idea is to create the kind of quality content that people will enjoy reading and want to share, in order to get your name out there and spread the word.
Hosting
Integrating your blog within your website is ideal from a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) perspective as all of the hits to your blog will directly benefit your search engine position. Add links from the main site to your blog.
If for any reason it is not possible to directly integrate the two, all is not lost! If you are hosting your blog on another domain you will simply need to ensure that your blog is well linked back to relevant sections of your main website, an easy way to do this of course is to use anchor text.
Set Yourself Targets
Set yourself a target number of posts to add to your blog each week and stick to it. One post a week would be a good minimum starting point to make the search engines love your site that little bit more! Your posts do not necessarily need to be published on the same day each week and can vary in size. Aim for around 250 – 500 words for the majority of your posts and write more on any topics that require more detail.
Sometimes if one of our team has written what we call a ‘monster blog’ then you can break it into two or three posts clearly stating that the next section will follow shortly. This not only makes it easier for readers to digest the information but increases the likelihood of them returning for the next bit.
Each new post gives the search engines another entry point to your website and this in turn increases the overall visibility of your site. Place links within the body of the text to direct your readers from your blog post to relevant pages within the site in order to build links and consequently boost your search engine position.
To maintain your minimum target you could consider using a schedule system to help you organize yourself. Scheduling is a particularly useful option to cover holiday periods and so on to maintain your usual rhythm and keep your readers engaged whilst you are away!
Get the team writing!
OK, this isn’t going to work if you’re a one-man band but if you have a team you can delegate blogging responsibilities to then do it! One blog a month is not to onerous a challenge for most people to take on so perhaps start with this. If they feel like writing more or can’t manage one a month (writers block…) then it’s not the end of the world.
Ask them to write about their specialist subject or role within the team this way they can take ownership of the blogs and unleash a bit of creativity in the process and everyone loves an opportunity to be creative especially if your job doesn’t normally allow it.
Simple Layouts Always Work Best
Avoid the temptation to clutter up your blog with unnecessary features and keep everything about its appearance as fresh as possible because a busy looking blog can be off putting to many online users.
Use traditional fonts that are easy to read, make sure the text is darker than your background color and you will avoid alienating your readers unnecessarily with a blog that is difficult to read.
Marketing Your Blog Effectively
Actively market your blog rather than leave it to chance that people will come across it, there are a number of ways to do this. Interacting with others online via Twitter and Facebook will help to draw traffic back to your own blog and website and leaving positive comments on other blogs can work extremely well too.
Another way to raise your online profile is to contribute guest blogs to other well-established blogs and get your name out there that way. Good blogs will attract readers but even the best ones need a boost so make sure you give them one and don’t rely on people stumbling across them by chance.
Adding social media buttons either at the beginning or end of your blogs (or both) gives readers a chance to show their appreciation by pressing and sharing the link to your blogs on their social media accounts. The more people that do this then the more hits on your blog. Simple.
Grab The Attention Of Your Target Audience
Play around with words to generate clever blog titles and make good use of images to grab people’s attention. Both titles and pictures will help to break up your text and make your blog posts more visually appealing to others. There are various websites (free & paid) that have enormous collections of photos all categorized and easy to search through which are ideal for using with blogs. Find a photo that links to what your blog is about and draw people in. The photos that accompanies this blog is from one of these sites!
Think about what it is like to thumb through a magazine, a newspaper or just surfing online looking for interesting stuff to read. Generally it is the title or image with the article or content that catches your eye and makes you stay and read the actual piece. This is exactly what you want to happen when people find your blogs.
Quality Over Quantity
Be creative, be passionate and focus on creating a great quality, useful blog that will stand out from the crowd and keep your readers coming back for more and telling other people about it.
A blog provides a solid foundation on which to build regular content, strengthen your website, attract new visitors, express some personality and attract a wider audience. Dedicate your time to developing your blog and reap the rewards of your hard work and remember… blogs don’t write themselves!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Felix Marsh is member of the team at Teapot Creative a design agency based in Somerset offering web design, graphic design & SEO services. They work closely with all of their clients – getting to understand their business, building relationships that last, delivering professional design at affordable prices with a personal touch.
*Image credits Shutterstock