Does Blogging Help SEO? Blogging SEO Best Practices

Does blogging help SEO?

Plain and simple….YES!

In fact, if you’re not blogging, you are leaving a huge chunk of money on the table.

As someone who has done SEO for all different types of clients from large E-commerce websites and global companies, to smaller & medium sized local businesses, in many cases the blog is what drives the most organic traffic to a website (and in some cases leads/sales).

You see, Google wants to see fresh content posted to your site consistently and this can be accomplished easily by blogging.

A blog can be a major asset to a business, even if it just creates more awareness or buzz around a brand, product or company.

Blog posts can also rank very highly in Google for a given keyword phrase which in return brings in free natural organic search traffic.

If you have a personal blog (similar to the one you’re reading right here), you should be writing unique articles at the very least once per week (same goes for a business blog).

Always approach your posts with the reader in mind as well as the search engines.

The one-two punch is making sure your writing is attractive for incoming human traffic and also for the Google bots that crawl your site.

Once you get a better feel for this and implement additional SEO strategies, the sky is the limit really with how much traffic your blog can generate.

It’s important to note, as I say many times, that blogging is a long-term approach and the same goes for SEO.

Don’t expect to post a couple of articles and bring in floods of traffic to your website.

Educate yourself on blogging and SEO, take a realistic/strategic approach, and realize that you’re building an asset for years to come.

Blogging without a doubt is one of the most powerful techniques you can use to strengthen the overall SEO of your website…Combine this with some link building techniques and watch your search rankings start to climb the ladder!

Blogging SEO Best Practices

Now that I’ve hopefully answered the question “Does blogging help SEO?” let’s dig into a few blogging SEO best practices.

Keyword research- It’s important that you have some sort of direction when it comes to writing your blog posts.  You will want to conduct some keyword research or micro keyword research to see what people are searching for in your niche.  Try to find keyword phrases that have decent search volume and don’t be afraid to use variations of your main keyword or longer tail keywords with 3 – 4 words total for a higher chance of ranking in the search rankings.

SEO Tags– It’s crucially important that all of your SEO tags are in place in every single blog post you write. These include your Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, Header Tags and Image ALT Tags. Just having these SEO tags in place with optimized target terms from your keyword research will put you well ahead of the competition.

Copy optimization & Internal links- You will also want to make sure your copy is optimized with relevant keyword phrases and that your keyword density is high enough (meaning that your target terms are mentioned enough times within the article).  Also within the article you will want to internally link to other relevant pages or blog posts on your website.  This will help users navigate your site more effectively as well as spread some link juice from page to page!

Social Sharing- The Internet is becoming more and more social everyday so it’s important that you share your blog posts on your social media platforms like Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn etc.  More importantly, blog posts have the potential to go viral so you should encourage your readers to share your content as well.

Consistency- Last but certainly not least (in fact this is one of the most important steps of all) is to be consistent with your blogging.  As stated above, at the very least you should be publishing a blog post once per week.  This comes out to around 4 blog posts per month which is not too shabby.  If you can do more than this, great! But it is critical that you remain persistent in your blogging and update your site with fresh content weekly.

Now of course there are additional techniques to help explode your search rankings and organic traffic from your blog like building high quality backlinks, but that’s another subject (and blog post) altogether.

Follow the steps mentioned above and remain consistent with a long-term approach and your website will be sure to see natural organic growth.

Now let me ask…do you utilize a blog for your business?