Blogging and SEO – A Perfect Small Business Match

It has become pretty obvious that blogs have been become an important part of marketing for almost any type of online business. They are unmatched resources when it comes to connecting with customers and potential customers.

But, there is an additional benefit that shouldn’t be over-looked: there impact on your Search Engine Optimization efforts. Blogging can greatly enhance any websites natural search results through regular postings, and natural keyword placement. There in fact is no stronger way to market ones website for free than by blogging with natural keywords.

Similar to article marketing, posting daily blogs with the keywords of your business included can have remarkable effects on the ranking of your site in any given search engine, and thus net you more traffic. One key to gaining more traffic from keywords is to use niche keywords. These are keywords or keyword phrases that may be searched for less often, but that have less competition. This means you may be able to rank much higher for these keyword. An example: The keyword term “baseball” is certainly searched for often, but there are millions of websites optimized around this keyword. However a keyword phrase like “Atlanta Braves pitcher John Smoltz news” would have fewer competitors. The longer keyword also increases the likelihood that your blog contains exactly what the visitor is looking for.

Getting picked up in search engines can lead to increase volumes of traffic heading to your site every day. There are top keyword placers that use blogs to retain huge amounts of daily traffic to their sites just by integrating a variety of niche keywords into their posts. The amazing thing about blogs is they are often picked up by the search engines almost as quickly as one posts to it, which makes it an even more powerful tool for SEO purposes. Our experience has been that blogs that take advantage of Google’s Blogger or Wordpress are quickly indexed.

Another way blogging can help your site’s search engine ranking is by the quality score. Most search engines, including Google rank sites with a quality score, the more unique, user provided content, the higher it appears the quality score becomes. If a website is just a sales page, and a few pictures, the quality score will most likely be low. But if a site has a blog on it, with fresh, daily posts, the quality score becomes much better, and thus the site gets ranked much higher when people are searching for your niche, or keyword terms.

If you haven’t considered a blog for the pure marketing aspect of it, it’s probably time you considered it from the SEO perspective. You’ve got nothing to lose but website visitors.

Five Reasons to Start a Business Blog

Five Reasons to Start a Business Blog

In a competitive environment where businesses are hard-pressed for advertising dollars but anxious to reach and impact a finicky consumer base, savvy businesses have turned to blogs.

Five reasons businesses find blogging beneficial are

1. Economics
Dollar for dollar, blogs are less expensive to create and maintain than traditional ad campaigns. They are convenient to utilize and can generally be launched and maintained at a fraction of the cost and effort of yesteryear’s advertising venues.

2. Infinite Branding
Blogs are “tagged” with key words and “linked” back to a business’s social media and website to build a digital footprint that builds upon itself. While many traditional ad campaigns can fizzle out over time, a properly maintained blog will build momentum and gain “advertising speed.”

3. Intimate Exposure
Blogs are an ongoing journal that share a company’s history, value system, announcements, progress, and new products and services. Companies use blogs as a forum to collect readers’ opinions, invite feedback, and educate people about their products or services. Blogs are a strong tool in relationship-building and allow consumers to do business with people they can get to “know,” like, and trust without traditional face-to-face pressures.

4. Consumer Trust and Confidence
What if you could build a sales force of people who represented your company just the way you wanted them to, 24/7? That is in essence what a blog can do for you. You construct your message and it reaches people intact without being diluted by other factors.

5. Outlast the Competition
In the past five years alone, there has been a strong, (startling!), and measurable shift in the way companies reach their customers. While blogging has become an advertising triumph for those in the know, those who cannot or choose not to enter the digital media ring to compete will soon find themselves knocked out.

Questions? Contact ShellyKent@comcast.net

Using Blogs in Business: Establishing your Edge

Blogging Takes Web by Storm, Businesses Scramble to Catch Up

Written By: Shelly Kent

Gone are the days of idle teens and all night web-dwellers posting petty comments alongside relevant articles. Today, blogging is a sensation that businesses turn to as a method of smart, relevant, and budget-friendly advertising in a careful attempt to navigate their growth and survival. Today’s savvy business owners use blogging as a method of communicating carefully planned and enticing information that is designed to educate and connect with their customers.

Professionals use blogs to establish credibility or relevance with their consumer base. A shop may communicate a new product, a restaurant–live band night, a bookstore–book signings. A blog should be an ongoing portal of communication that builds information for your readers. Doctors may blog to communicate their medical opinions on debated issues such as vaccine and autism, or the HPV vaccine for young girls. They can also use blogging to disseminate important information quickly, such as symptoms that should prompt a medical visit during the Swine Flu outbreak.

Effective blogging takes time, a keen sense of business, and an intuitive approach to what customers need to hear. Using an informal tone and educating customers about your industry without directly pushing your product will make your blog one your audience will both watch for and value.

The benefits of maintaining a business blog are
• Search engines will rank you higher based upon your readership and how recently your content was updated. Higher rankings mean more visitors, resulting in more clients and more dollars.
• You can communicate instantly and effectively with your client base, many of whom will come to rely upon your blogs as their information source.
• Clients can reach you about topics relevant to them. They can provide you with consumer feedback or initiate a conversation any time of day or night.
• You establish credibility and create a connection with your consumers. Blogs are a personal conversation with your customers and demonstrate that there are astute and thoughtful individuals in your business versus a large, inaccessible corporation.
• The casual nature of blogging allows your company to gain recognition for things that are typically left out of mainstream advertising. (I.e., charity work, employee profiles, product reviews, industry advice.)
• Blogging communicates the culture of your organization and builds both trust and authority with your readership.
Blogs should always contain

Relevant Information
Accurate Communication
Timely News
Frequent Updates
Proper Grammar and Spelling (limited abbreviations)
Text that is Casual and Friendly in Tone

For more information, or for help maintaining your company’s blogs, please contact me at shellykent@comcast.net.

Until next time, Farewell and Blog-Luck!
~Shelly Kent
www.shellykent.com