How To Boost the Search Ranking of Your Small Business Blog

If you have a small business blog or are thinking of starting one, you should know how to use your blog to drive traffic to your website. It’s easier than you might think.

The first thing to understand about blogging is that each blog entry is counted as one webpage. Even if your blog displays six blog articles on the same page, search engines register them as a separate webpage. 

That’s why treating each blog article as an SEO tool is essential. Keep the following tips in mind for each blog article to optimize them for search engines and drive more organic traffic to your website from your blog:

1. Optimize each blog post around a single keyword
2. Ensure your keyword is in your blog post title, preferably at the beginning
3. Use subheadings with or tags that also use your keyword
4. Include 1-3 keyword links (anchor text) in your blog posts
5. Sign every blog post with a signature link that uses your keyword
6. Use bold and italics effectively to emphasize specific keywords and phrases
7. Ping the directories
8. Include tags for all your blog entries
9. Use blog categories effectively
10. Make links appear natural by linking to internal pages of your website

Because each blog entry is a separate webpage, the search engines will crawl and index them just like your standard webpages. Optimize each one heavily around a target keyword related to your content, and that’s an extra doorway into your website for each page indexed by the search engines. 

Also, by adding anchor text to a couple of those keywords and pointing those links to relevant internal web pages on your site, you are improving the SEO effect of your blog article. 

A poll of top SEO experts by Moz revealed that these types of keyword links are among the top 10 most important SEO factors for ranking webpages. Don’t give up on keywords and anchor text.

You’ll also want to include keyword tags with each blog entry. The search engines will use those tags to index your pages appropriately for your keywords. Also, social bookmarkers will find it easier to tag your blog entry if they like it, making it easier to share among their social group.

Use a specific keyword-related category to make your blog posts more crawlable by search engines. Your blog category should indicate an essential element of interest as well. Unlike tags, you should only choose one category for each blog post. Don’t use “main” or “uncategorized.” Those are too generic.

There are more than 100 blog directories that you can ping to let them know you have updated your blog. With WordPress, and several other blogging software platforms, you can input each directory into a field, and the software will send out an automatic ping each time you update your blog. I suggest you do this every time you update your blog. If you are not using WordPress, you should go to Ping-o-Matic and use it to ping your blog for free.

Finally, if you sign your blog posts with a keyword-rich signature that points to a relevant internal page, this will make your website more crawl-able and give you another anchor text link. Use something like, “Find Out More About Keyword.” Then add another link that points to your home page.

The critical thing to remember about keywords and links, whether on your blog or your website, is to make them appear natural. The benefits are enormous.