You’ve heard from numerous sources that having a blog on your website is important for content marketing. How do you get started with your blog though? What do you write about? How do you make sure you get found in search engines? Today, we’re going to give you some answers to these questions, and more. Let’s dive in!
Key(words) To The Castle. Keywords are important because they provide Google’s search spiders a way to locate your website, and to quickly evaluate its relevance against the terms typed into the search engine. Just remember to write your content for people first and not search engines. In other words, don’t write content that makes no sense and just has a bunch of keywords in it. Instead of keeping people on your website, it will actually have the opposite effect, and will drive people away.
Keep It Short & Sweet. Your title competes among many others in the search engine results pages. Search engines can read up to 80 characters but will generally show less. Make your title relevant, concise and attractive in order to encourage people to click on your link and read what you have to say.
Mighty Meta. Your meta description is 2 -3 sentences summarizing the webpage’s content, and appears under the webpage’s title in the search results. Keep in mind that each page on your website needs its own meta description. The meta description can be up to 150 characters, and needs to be descriptive, persuasive, and inspire curiosity in order to encourage people to go to your webpage.
A Picture is Worth 1,000 Words. Well, maybe not 1,000, but having alternative text (or alt text) on the images on your website is important for search engine optimization. Basically alt text is what the search engine robots use to “read” the content of an image when you do an image search. In order to optimize your images correctly, include keywords in your alt text description. This will help you to optimize your website and become even more SEO-friendly.
Link It All Together. Many times, the default link structure for your webpage will be something like www.example.com/193876jnl872/ Instead of leaving it as-is, make the link descriptive! For example, if your webpage is about SEO tips, use www.example.com/seo-tips/. This will help people and search engines to get an even better idea of what your content is all about.
Be A Button Pusher. Social media sharing buttons allow for direct-connection opportunities, interaction, and a way to get the word out about your website. By making it easy for people to share relevant articles to their social media platform of choice, you increase the chances of it happening (instead of relying on them to copy and paste the link.) Social media sharing buttons also allow you to track the number of shares an article will get, and on what platform(s).
Make Your Mark. Your brand is invaluable. In everything you create and share with the world, don’t forget to put your stamp on it. If you need a refresher on branding basics, check out our primer here, and take a look at our signature below for ideas.
Keep It Fresh. Playing by the rules listed above is important, but fresh content needs to be added on a regular basis. It doesn’t matter how SEO-friendly your posts are if they’re old and irrelevant. Fresh new content about industry-related topics and your company will rank better in search engines.
GTECH Designs is a Baltimore-based web marketing firm that is committed to helping impact-makers spend more time doing good. For more information, contact us at 410-775-4100, email us at [email protected], or get in touch with us via Facebook or Twitter.
