Google & SEO

Does my website need a blog?

Cool Graphic Design of Someone Creating A Blog for Their Website | RGB Internet Content Creation

As a small business owner interested in increasing your website’s ranking on search engines you’ve done your research. And there is a good chance that you have asked yourself: Does my website need a blog? If you have been thinking about this, you’re on the right track. Blogs are a great way to start improving your website’s organic search rankings.

Here’s just some of the reasons to consider blogging:

  • Blogs can help increase organic ranking for niche keyword phrases
  • Interesting, engaging blog posts will bring people (and search engines) to your site
  • Blogs can increase your brand reach and sets you apart from your competitors
  • They build trust with your clients; an informed website will produce more leads

If you do decide to begin posting blogs, it’s important you do it right.

The 2 Golden Rules for Blog Posting:

1. Make the time to create consistent content that is useful to your visitors. Imagine you are searching for a new dentist online and you find one that you like. They have a blog page and you navigate over to check it out, just to discover that their last blog post was in 2014! What does this mean? Is the business no longer open? An abandoned blog can drastically affect the way your website is viewed by visitors to your site.

2. Don’t steal your images or content. Adding images to your blogs is a no-brainer. People are visual by nature, and great images for your posts on your social media pages will entice your fans to visit your blog. We often find that people grab an image and add it to their site, unaware that they cannot use an image they find on the internet without permission. If that image is not released free of copyrights you may be using an image without permission, and can face fines and legal issues. Your website may also be removed from search engines. The same is true of written content on your site.

Even if you have been given permission to post content someone else has written on your site it is not a recommended practice. Search engines will know that this is duplicate content, they will determine that your site was not the first to post this content, and they will rank you accordingly.

Decided to add blogs to your website?

Follow these steps:

blog-writing-process-step-1-update-your-websiteMake sure your website is up to date. If a client comes to us asking to add blogs to a site our first step is to make sure the website is current. We do this because adding a new site feature (such as blog posts) to outdated websites can cause display and functionality issues. If you aren’t what they would call “web-savvy,” your web-developer will be able to setup your blog and provide the training needed for you to be able to post the blogs you create to your site.

blog-writing-process-step-2-researchDo your research. Look at Google Analytics, check out your competitors’ websites. Do they have blogs? What kind of topics are they discussing? How long are their blogs? Do they include images? What can you bring to the blogging table that will make your blog stand out as unique?

blog-writing-process-step-3-content-creationCreate. If you are prone to writer’s block a great way to get started is to think about the questions that your clients commonly ask you about your products or services. Begin writing blogs that answer those questions. Creating blogs with the intention of ranking higher for specific keyword phrases? Be sure to include the keyword phrase in the url, meta-description, titles, as well as the blog content itself. However, be aware that using the keyword too often in the text may be interpreted as keyword stuffing, which will negatively affect your organic ranking on search engines.

blog-writing-process-step-4-post-to-sitePost & Index. When adding your blog to the site it is imperative to create unique meta descriptions for each blog that explain what the post is about. This text should be no longer that 150 words. This is the text you will see when your blog shows up in a search term. You can see what we are talking about in the image below.

meta-description-exampleOnce you have your post and any accompanying images uploaded and formatted, index your new page with Google Webmaster Tools. Essentially, this tells Google to come and visit your new page, which it will eventually find on its own; this way is just faster. To index your new page log into Google Search Console tools, navigate to crawl, then click fetch as Google, and add your new URL.

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