How to Make a Successful Blog


blog-seo-tips How to Make a Successful Blog

How

Blogs are like informal platforms for people to share information and communicate. Many times, search engines crawl blogs faster than websites. Hence, a blog will have a greater chance of ranking better in search results than any website. This will in turn mean that anything that you post on your blog will rank better. If your blog is linked to your site, then by extension, your site will as well rank better. Due to this feature of blogs, they have become very important for SEO as they can play a vital role in helping a site perform better in search results.

SEO Tips for Bloggers

Just because blogs are favored by search engines and are growing in popularity, it does not mean that every blog will perform well in search engines. There are certain things that you need to follow or do in order to make sure that your blog does well. This article provides a few SEO blogging tips that can make your blog perform well in search engines:

Understand what your blog is about

One of the most important steps is to determine what your blog is going to be about. Decide on what kind of content you intend to have on your blog and whether it will be a corporate platform or a personal blog. Once you decide what the blog is going to be about, it will become easy for you to create it, categorize the content on it and archive all your previous blog posts.

Decide on a blogging platform and design

If you want a blog for your business, then it can benefit you if you create a custom made platform depending on what your business needs. However, not everyone who owns a small and growing business will be able to create a custom made platform. The platform that you choose for your business can have a great impact on its performance. Some of the most common blogging platforms to choose from are WordPress, Blogger, MovableType, etc. You can also choose from a paid blogging CMS or its free version. The paid one will come with more features.

Like the platform, the design of the blog also plays an important role and tells a lot about the owner of the blog. Your blog needs to be designed well keeping in mind the kind of work you do and what your business will need. It always helps to get someone create a custom made design for your blog as most of the blog templates will be similar and will make your blog look like just another blog.

Decide on your blog location

There are many free blogging platforms like WordPress and Blogger. Though these are free, they may not be as beneficial to you in the long term as a blog that is hosted on your own domain name. Setting up a blog on your own domain name will increase the credibility of your blog and will help you in the long run.

Posting on your blog

Though it is treated like an informal platform to express your views and ideas, you need to think about your target audience when you post anything on your blog. You need to ask yourself questions like who will be reading these posts and on what searches should this post show up? You need to put yourself in your audience’s shoes when you create a blog post. Also, it will help to do a little bit of keyword research before creating the post so that you can add words that are related to your post and most searched by the people to the content in a meaningful way.

Make your blog different

There are lots and lots of similar blogs on the internet with information from different kinds of industries posted. Why would someone come to your blog and read it when they can find the same information somewhere else? You need to think of a way to make your blog different from the others. Your blog should be different enough to attract your user’s attention and still give just the right information that your user needs to know. You can do this either by adding a personal touch to the post or talking about the development in the industry from the user’s perspective.

Variety of blog posts

Don’t add only content on your blog. A lot of content to read can bore your readers and make them leave your blog. Mix your blog posts with images or even videos wherever possible. This will add variety to your blog and will also give your readers relief from all the content that they may otherwise have to read.

Will it be useful to get guest bloggers?

When you start a new blog, you are not known among the industry or on the internet. It can get difficult to convince people to visit your blog and read your content. It can help to have guest bloggers post on your site every now and then till you build credibility among your readers. You do not have to stop the guest blog posts once you become well known among your audience. The guest blog posts can continue as long as they are only a part of your blog content and not a majority of it.

Keep SEO in mind while posting content on your blog

Try to keep the posts of your blog as different from each other as possible. Avoid having similar titles for your posts. Many times the headings of the blog posts are used as titles for the page. Try and keep these titles simple and reader centric so that people want to visit your blog when they read these titles. Try and keep the URL of your blog simple and avoid using random characters and symbols for it.

Make your blog interactive

This is a difficult thing for many new bloggers. If yours is a new blog, there is a good chance that no one may initially comment on your posts and this can make your blog look boring and uninteresting. However, if you disable the commenting facility, it will do your blog no good. You need to realize that if the content on your blog is good, people are eventually going to comment on it either in the form of feedback or response to whatever you have posted.

Promote the blog in a meaningful and effective way

Just having a blog and adding content to it is not enough. You need to promote your blog. Some ways to do this would be by adding a link to your blog in the signature of your email or on your FaceBook and LinkedIn profiles. It is important to make it easy for people to find your blog. Not many people will spend a lot of time trying to find it.

Participate on other blogs

Every industry has its set of bloggers. Even the industry that you write about in your blog will have a set of bloggers. It is important for you to take a part in the discussions on other blogs as most of these bloggers will visit other blogs and follow other blogs in their respective communities. The more number of posts that you participate in, the more number of people will begin to follow you.

Tagging the posts on your blog

It is necessary to tag your posts if you want people to find them on your blog. Tag them and bookmark them on other social bookmarking sites as well. This will make your blog visible to people on these communities who in turn will visit it.

Insert links wisely in your blog posts

It is vital for you to make sure that you link wisely on your blog as who your blog links to and who links back to your blog can help search engine crawlers identify your area of interest and expertise. A few meaningful and quality links will help your blog more than lots and lots of meaningless links.

Don’t try to generate an income from your blog very early

Having advertisements on your blog can help you earn from it. However, it would not make sense to keep ads on your blog before you generate a considerable amount of traffic to it. Readers can get irritated if there are lots of ads on the blog.

Track your blog regularly

Just having a blog and posting regularly on it will not help you. It is also important for you to track the performance of your blog so that you can make changes to it to improve its rankings. You can get your blog verified with the Google Webmaster Tool. You can also use Google Analytics, which is free of cost, to analyze the traffic on your site. Both these tools will also be helpful to you in determining if there are any mistakes on the blog and correcting them.

Blog development services from Flying Cow Design

Flying Cow Design is a leading web development and internet marketing services company. We have been helping clients with their website, blog and online marketing needs for over twenty years. When you need a professional blog or website and need to market it for success and traffic, contact us!

fb50c5bf790872a8ecad33a6bd15d358?s=100&d=mm&r=g How to Make a Successful Blog

CEO, Flying Cow Design
Attended University of Auckland
Lives in San Francisco Bay Area

October 15th, 2016


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