When I first joined the team at Dynamic Edge, and Bruce told me that I’d be starting up the company’s first ever blog, I was a little (ok, a LOT) nervous. Aside from making keen observations about the quirkiness of the world around me and venting general complaints, I’d never written a blog about anything at all… let alone a company blog that was supposed to entertain and inform readers!
So, why a blog? Had I missed something? Wasn’t a news page good enough?
Not to be confused with your typical social networking blog sites, like LiveJournal, Facebook, Myspace, Xanga, et. al, company blogs serve a much higher purpose. These days, more and more companies are adding blogs because they naturally attract search engine traffic. Blog pages are text-rich, link-rich, and frequently-updated pages that often contain useful information. And, because most blogs run on simple Content Management System (CMS), it is very easy to optimize them by using keywords, headers, bolded text, image tags, and relevant links.
If your company isn’t ready to make an investment in AdWords or organic keyword research and implementation, blogging could be a great way for to get your website a little more visibility. Setup cost for a blog is usually inexpensive and doesn’t require you to change your web page.
Here are a few tips I’d recommend to get your blog on the road to good SEO:
- Use Keyword Rich Content – identify a few keywords for your article that you’re hoping will get indexed highly by Google.
- Develop a Theme – you may be able to improve your rank well by having a substantial amount of pages with a similar theme.
- Think Design – Search Engines don’t really like Flash, Frames or Java Script in your site, so keep it simple and clean and their robots will index your site a lot faster and more accurately.
- Link Smart – Search Engines index your blog by sending little robot crawlers to track what you’ve written and follow the links. Make it easier for them to get around your blog by using internal linking wisely.
- Update Regularly – The more you update your blog the more often Search Engines will send their crawlers to your site to index it. TYour new articles could appear in the index within days or even hours!
- Outbound Links – link out to quality relevant sites that your readers will find useful.
- Stay on Topic – the more tightly focused the theme of a page the better when Search Engines come to rank it.
- Avoid Duplicate Content – Google discriminates against bloggers who post the same content on multiple pages. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot!
When the idea of our UnCorporate blog emerged, it took less than three hours to get it up and running — and we immediately noticed an increase in web traffic! If you don’t have a company blog on your web domain, contact us and we can get one up and running for you!
Hasta luego!
storm
