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Are you using a blog to attract customers, promote your business, and sell your product or service? Here are a few tips for making your business blog successful with both customers and search engines.
1. Always provide high-quality, value-added content. While your main interest as a business owner may be to sell your product or service, your prospective customer is more interested in what you have to offer that won't cost him anything. This is one reason content will always be king even in the business sector of the blogosphere. Not only does value-laden content draw the reader in and hold his interest; it also provides useful information that makes his life easier, which increases your credibility and keeps your customer coming back.
Steve Rubel, of Micro Persuasion, gives five reasons Why Text Remains King of the Web. You'll want to check them out.
Willie Crawford also states, in How to Get Massive Free Website Traffic:
You can also create traffic by putting things on the Internet that people are attracted to. You can create content by writing articles or blogging for example. I love content creation and have written over 1100 different articles. My articles teach people how to solve pressing problems, and at the same time point them to me (my sites) as a great resource.
2. Optimize your high-value content by including appropriate keywords in all your blog posts, supplementing this technique by making good use of keywords elsewhere on both your blog and your main website. Embed keyword rich links in your blog content to take the reader to appropriate pages on your main website which feature your products or services. Other prominently yet tastefully displayed links, set up for ease of navigation along the top of your blog or in your sidebar, will help your readers locate everything your site has to offer, benefiting both you and them.
In You're Up a Link Creek Without an Anchor, Debra Mastaler has this to say:
Most people involved in SEO knows [sic] about anchor text and its benefits...Anchor text is a query ranking indicator and considered the most powerful component of link popularity. Since link popularity is what (mostly) drives search rankings, I'd say it's a pretty important part of your SEO program.
3. Always allow your visitors to move freely between the pages of your website. For the ultimate good of your company, never attempt to prevent your visitors from leaving a web page - no matter how much you may be tempted to try to keep them there. This strong-arm cyber tactic never works and only serves to annoy visitors, making them sorry they ever clicked your link in the first place. It often also steels their resolve to flee your site as quickly as they can and stay as far away as possible in the future. Such an "audience reaction" brings zero value to your business. So, please resist the temptation to try this highly questionable tactic, and always respect your readers' right to freedom of movement on the Web. It will pay off in the long run.
You can't prevent people from leaving your website...if they don't want to stay, from Newcastle University has the following to say on this topic:
Worrying about whether or not your users will return to your site, or attempting to actually prevent them from leaving is futile: provide a valuable service and your job is done. If they need your site again, they will return to it. People vote with their feet and attempting to prevent them from doing so will at best cause user irritation and at worst will be an accessibility or usability problem.
4. Supplement your on- and off-page blog SEO with other types of social media. This can help increase traffic to your blog, as well as to your main website. Use keyword-rich descriptions and links to your blog content and company web pages on social media sites such as Facebook and Digg to draw traffic and keep it flowing between your sites and thereby make the most of the current social media goldmine.
In Blogs Are for More than Just SEO, Lee Odden has this to say:
...When it comes to blogs, consumer information discovery trends are involving social networks and social media at an increasing rate. Recommendations are competing with search. When looking at the web analytics of our blog and client blogs, social media traffic is in the top 5 referring sources of traffic. Blogs are social and social media sources will become increasingly important for many business blogging efforts in the coming year.
Some great places to incorporate keywords in your business blog are:
Blog Template:
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Blog title
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Tagline
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Post URLs
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Categories
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Tags
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Recent Posts list
Blog Posts:
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Post titles
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Post subtitles
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Link anchor text
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Close to other keywords
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Image captions
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Image titles/ALT tags
Special Pages:
