Is it Possible to Use a Blog to get More Website Traffic?

May 5th, 2010

Your business blog is a very effective way of generating traffic to your business website. It can work wonders as a method of getting through to your customers, and when your blog is used frequently you will find you’re getting more pages on your site indexed very quickly.

Blogging experts always do the following:

they post regularly
they know want they want to talk about
they share knowledge
they don’t preach, but rather they share

But why are blogs so effective at driving traffic?

1. Blog should be equipped with an RSS feed and links for Bookmarking. These allow others to bookmark, follow and distribute your blog posts, and help to grow your circulation list.

2. A regularly updated blog provides fresh content and adds a new page on your website every time you make a new blog post. This grows your site, adds keywords and increases its critical mass in the eyes of the search engines.

3. Your blog is a content machine.. And content is the stuff that Google and the other search engines feed off. Savvy bloggers know the value in SEO terms of all this relevant, updated content and adopt the same working principles as if it were a page on a normal website.

(It is important to understand – don’t, at all, blog for Google’s benefit – that’s entirely a misguided reason for having a blog and it won’t help to engage your target audience. A blog is designed for followers and customers, not the search engines.)

Is there an ideal structure to optimise the SEO value of a blog post?

Your Blog’s Title

Use one of your keyword phrases in your blog title. Search engines give greater weighting to the words in the title. The title must make sense though for human readers.

Keywords:

Keyword research is a funamental of Search Engine Optimisation. Always perform your keyword research, just like normal SEO. Then chose a small group of keywords (5 or 6) and use this throughout your blog post. Make sure They are well matched to the blog subject matter to keep things focussed and relevant.

Placement of Keywords:

The search engines give greater prominance to the first paragraph, so place your chosen keyword(s) at least once here. Although don’t go over the top . Aim for a keyword or keyphrase density of 1% (i.e. 1 mention of the keyphrase in 100 words).

Linking:

Use your blog post as an opportunity to link to other relevant pages or articles (with the emphasis on relevant). This counts as much for internal linking (to your own website) as to external linking (to other peoples’ websites). It all helps the crawlers navigate themselves around your pages and your website.

Length of blog post:

Aim for around 300-400 words. The main thing is to create a good balance between long posts (good for search engines) and shorter ones (which are more digestable for real people!). Internet users have notoriously short attention spans.