Blogging is one of the most powerful online marketing tools that is free and fairly easy to implement. If you question whether blogging is a powerful marketing tool that could benefit your business, let me convince you otherwise.
You can only exploit the power that is inherent in blogging by making it possible for your target customers to find your blog. Every blog post that you write is another web page that gets indexed by the search engines which presents you with an opportunity to rank your web page and site higher for a specific search phrase that your customer is using to conduct his search right now.
Keyword research is an important piece of blogging effectively.
It all begins with words typed into a search box.
“Keyword research is one of the most important, valuable, and high return activities in the search marketing field. Ranking for the “right” keywords can make or break your website. Through the detective work of puzzling out your market’s keyword demand, you not only learn which terms and phrases to target with SEO, but also learn more about your customers as a whole.” Moz.com They have a great beginners guide.
Achieving Visibility through Blogging
Blogging is a very powerful tool for SEO and online visibility. Its power is best exemplified by a few blogs that have been professionally written. Is your blog one of those that showcases great blogging talent? If not, don’t worry it’s not that tough to master, in know time you will be able to do this and enjoy search engine visibility, more traffic, leads and improved sales for your business.
What scares many is finding blog ideas. Evergreen content is what is needed in your blog.
“Evergreen content is content that is perpetually relevant. The word evergreen is most often used by editors to describe certain kinds of stories, stories that, because of their topic, are always of interest to readers.
The idea behind the evergreen stories is that they’re always fresh, i.e. forever green.” About.com
How do you generate content from? There are many ways for you to generate evergreen content ideas. Scour through some of the most popular sites such as Yahoo Answers, Quora, YouTube and other forums where your customers may be seeking answers to their questions.
Now that you have a few ideas of what you may put down in writing you are ready to move to the next stage – keyword research. With the help of Google Keyword Planner which has replaced Google Adwords Keyword Tool you can see how many people are searching for your phrases on a monthly basis. This tool also gives you suggestions of other related terms that offer a better opportunity to rank higher.
Penning down your ideas starts with the title of your post. The title automatically becomes your web page’s title. Too often businesses provide their blog posts with indistinguishable titles such that their prospects are not able to find these posts. Be very careful with the way you pen down your post’s title. The page title is probably one of the most important variables used by search engines to help prospects find your page.
For maximum visibility use your keywords in the title of your blog post. Generally search engines give more weight to the first few words in the title. Be creative with your post’s title, communicate clearly using the title where possible using numbers in the title e.g. “5 Reasons Why You Should Start Saving For Retirement Early”. And although the title is important it cannot stand alone, it will have to be supported by the rest of your work. The copy that you pen down needs to feature your keyword phrase in the first or second sentence. Then ensure the keyword is used in the rest of the article whilst avoiding over optimization. Meaning it must be natural and not forced. Link the keyword to other content within your website that is complimentary to the post you just wrote. Add a photo to your post and use the keyword in the title and the alt tag of the image. Being careful to not just grab an image from the internet. Be certain to have rights to the image or it can hit your wallet at a significant cost.
The constant, new content on your website will allow the search engines to understand what your site is about and give it more relevance in the search results.
You can access a Blogging Guide to get started here.
If you have a blog that you would like to share add it to the comments and other readers can check it out. If you do check out someones blog leave them a comment about the content or why you like their blog, add the link to your own site and you both will benefit.