Your blog is a powerful tool. Publishing blog content on a regular basis can provide an organization with a number of distinct benefits, which include:
- Brand building and awareness.
- Positioning yourself as a thought leader.
- Demonstrating your (or your organization's) expertise.
- Developing relationships within your niche.
- Fostering an engaged and active community.
- Generating leads.
Blogging is also powerful from an SEO standpoint as well. Strategic and active blogging can help you:
- Incite more crawling – the more you publish, the more your site gets crawled.
- Penetrate more keyword verticals.
- Attract links – provided you're promoting your content; passive link acquisition is difficult if not impossible for most sites.
- Generate social signals.
- Drive more organic traffic.
Despite the inherent "SEO value" of blogging, many blogs just aren't
properly optimized for search, or aren't optimized to their fullest
potential. As such, these blogs aren't working as hard as they could be
for an organization from an SEO standpoint.
Many of the fixes and improvements you can make are really quite
simple. Let's take a look at six steps every organization can take today
to improve their blog's SEO.
1. Practice Good Pagination
Pagination on a blog is a system for enumerating pages so you can
organize and archive content. Pagination is particularly helpful for
usability because housing all your blog posts on a single page that
scrolls endlessly isn't a practical or user-friendly approach. A single
page with hundreds of blog entries would undoubtedly hurt load times
too.
When it comes to SEO, pagination implemented correctly maximizes
"crawl depth" and makes your content easier for engines to access by
reducing the number of clicks needed to reach deeper, archived pages. In
addition, proper pagination is a scalable way to flow more (or a larger
percentage) of PageRank to your archived content.
Here are some solid examples of SEO-friendly pagination (multiple,
numbered hyperlinks means fewer clicks to reach older content).
It isn't just blogs. Search engines practice good pagination
practices as well, so take a page (or a post, if you will) out of
Google's playbook.
If that's good pagination, then what's bad pagination?
Examples of poor pagination (or complete lack of) are pretty rampant
across the Web. Some of the biggest offenders are free, off-the-shelf
WordPress templates where you get a either a single hyperlink to access
archived content "older entries," or two links "older entries" and
"newer entries."
So why is the above example bad?
Having a single link means it can take exponentially more clicks to
reach older content, which can make it harder for bots to find. Also, a
single link means each subsequent archived index page (and the posts
linked from it) is getting a smaller percent of a percent of PageRank.
By the time you've gone five clicks deep into your archive, those pages
and posts are starved for link equity.
Some of my favorite pagination plugins are:
2. Add Related Posts
As mentioned in the above section on pagination, it's critical that
you make your blog content easy to find (both for bots and users). If
your content is buried a dozen clicks deep or if it's orphaned entirely,
that content can drop out of the index or won't have enough link equity
to outrank competitor documents, rendering those pages useless from a
SEO perspective.
So another way to improve the findability of your content is to add a
list of related articles at the end of each of all your blog posts. Not
only does this elicit more page views with readers, but this practice
also helps flow link equity to deeper content and improves the
circulation of PageRank across your blog. Finally, given there are
keywords in the anchor text, related posts are an internal linking
mechanism that reinforce the semantic relevance of a document they're
linking to.
If you're running on WordPress, adding related posts is relatively
easy, and there are a range of some very good related post plugins:
3. Add Previous and Next Posts
Similar to implementing a related posts feature on your blog, you can
increase findability with "previous" and "next" post links, which can
appear at the top or at the bottom of an article on your blog.
Much like adding related posts, "previous" and "next" article links
effectively surfaces your content and improves link equity distribution.
In addition, these types of navigational links can help increase time
on site, and boost overall user-engagement and satisfaction signals via
the "long click,"
a behavior metric Google is potentially measuring.
4. Proper Use of Categories
Categories are another component on your blog you can leverage to
boost your organic search efforts. Besides making archived content
easier to find (a common thread here), categories help classify and silo
your content into topically themed pages, which creates additional
opportunities to rank in search results.
Some category best practices are:
- Limit the number of categories you have. Categories are often
misused or abused with contributors creating a new category every time
they write a new post, which can lead to really thin pages of content
(pages with a single post snippet). For small- to medium-sized blogs, 10
to 15 categories are really all you need.
- Select only one category per post. Contributors often abuse the
category select feature and click on multiple categories before posting,
which can risk duplicate content issues.
- Add original content to your categories to help make them unique. This plugin works well for adding introductory content to category pages
5. Vary Title Tags vs. Article Titles
Keywords are the foundation for your SEO efforts. Most bloggers
understand this and often include keywords and keyword variations in
their copy. But where many authors drop the ball is by not varying the
title of the blog post and the title tag element.
Often this is due to inexperience, time constraints, or the option
doesn't exist in their dashboard (which is easily remedied with the
proper plugin). As such, the CMS or publishing platform duplicates the
post title and the title tag with copy and paste.
Will this negatively impact SEO? No. But given the title tag is still
the most important piece of content on your site (from an SEO
perspective), not varying title and title tag is really more of a missed
opportunity.
By varying your title and title tag and working in alternative
keywords, stems, modifiers or synonyms, you make your content work even
hard for you in the SERPs. And the more keyword variations in your
content, the more opportunities your content has to rank in more
searches.
There are a number of SEO plugins that allow you to vary post title and title tag, but my favorites are:
6. Add Sharing Buttons
Adding social buttons prompts sharing, which improves the
distribution or your content across social platforms. Sharing can also
help expose your content to new audiences.
From an SEO perspective, getting your content shared increases the
likelihood of mentions and links. Also sharing helps your content get
discovered faster; and the quicker it's found, the sooner it shows up in
the index.
What's more, Google is gathering social data and this data impacts rankings.
To what extent those social signals influence rankings is debatable,
but Google clearly places some degree of value on social, and so should
you.
To help increase distribution of your content across social channels,
you need to implement frictionless sharing. Make your share buttons
obvious, but not disruptive or distracting.
Sharebar is my favorite social sharing plugin for WordPress. It doesn't support Google+, but
this quick snippet of code solves that.
Sharebar is good for two reasons. It shadows the reader as they move
down the page, and it contains "share counts," which can help convey
further trust, authority and popularity of an article for an audience.
