Do Blogs Help Your SEO is a question all our clients enquire about.
Blogs have all sorts of benefits for your website; they increase awareness of your business, give you a platform to share your expertise and knowledge for your customers.
This on it’s own makes blogging a huge strategy for your website – but it also helps with your website’s ranking on search engines.
How do blogs help your SEO?
First and foremost it helps keep your website up-to-date.
There are so many neglected websites out there than even Google can poke a stick at. That’s why Google’s search engines are constantly crawling when websites are updated.
Posting blogs is a very sensible and natural way to update your website often, which is a signal to Google that it’s being looked after and is a good place to send web users. A new blog every couple of weeks will show those ‘bots that things are proceeding on your website.
Tip: It’s important that the content you write on your blog is of quality content that your visitors will want to stick around and read.
It raises the number of pages in your website.
This is the real secret to SEO. Have you heard the phrase content is king? The more content you have, the more the search engines will crawl and index your site. This helps give the crawlers a better understanding of what your site is all about, and what types of searches it should rank for.
It also provides you with the opportunity to extend out on your keyword use. There are two main obtsacles with SEO:
A low number of pages means a low number of keywords you can use.
Because of the way Google’s search engines work, you can only optimise any given page for one or two keywords without diminishing their effect. If you try to optimise a website with four pages for everything your customer could be looking for, it just won’t work well.
And you can only use keywords so many times.
Keyword stuffing is when you go a too much in trying to pack your keywords onto one page. It usually identifies by keywords that show up in a list or even seems forced in a selection of content. Search engines can pick this up, and they could assume that you are trying to trick them into giving your site a better ranking – which just has the opposite effect.
Because blogs are usually about a single subject, they’re useful for fusing a range of keywords into your website without running the risk of overloading – and by increasing the number of pages in your website with blogs, you’re giving yourself a better opportunity to use your keywords and to include different keywords without disturbing your current keywords.
Blogging comes with advantages for SEO.
There are a couple of advantages that your business can gain out of a blog as an SEO strategy:
It’s fantastic for direct SEO…
…this means anything that search engines can see and use in the algorithm to rank your website on search engine results pages (SERPs). This is your blog’s content.
It helps with indirect SEO…
…this means anything that leverages your visitors to act in ways that tell search engines that your website is a useful resource.
This can include:
- Influencing longer visits. If your customers click on your website from the SERP but click “back” straight away tells search engines that the content on your site is not good. By bringing people in with quality content that they want to read will help them them to stay on your website. This tells search engines that your website is a good place to send people looking for that sort of information.
- Encourages inbound links. When your customers think that a website has quality content, they are more likely to include links to your website as a reference. Search engines see those links that direct users to your website as a sort of vote of confidence. You can also put inbound links to your own website in your blogs, which again helps search engines find out what your website is about.
Tip: It’s critical to play by the rules when writing your own content.
It HAS to be unique, original and relevant; Google loves content that does not exist anywhere else on the web, and can even penalise duplicate content, so ensure it’s your own words.
It so important that your content is relevant; if the keywords, meta description, title and body of the blog don’t work with the subject matter, the search engines won’t like it – and tricking them will fail!