The SEO Blog

More and more blogs are appearing everyday and knowing that there are nearly 350 million people reading blogs it’s not hard to see why.

There are many reasons to consider starting a blog, however the first thing you should do is consider why you need one.  What is your strategy and ultimate goal?  A lot of people blog to get noticed or to help promote their business or product.  Some blog just to let off steam and contribute to a community.   As with every marketing strategy you need to know your goal before your start.

Blogs are a great way of connecting with your customers.  If you run an Internet business then the chances are that your customers don’t know you from Adam, so Blogging provides an outlet for you to make a personal connection with them.  It also gives them the opportunity to make comments to your posts so you know how they feel about certain things.
In turn this helps customers and helps your business, because you are being provided with valuable feedback.

A big factor in setting up is a blog is the cost.  They are really cheap to startup and many blogging platforms, such as WordPress are free.  All you need is a domain name, some web space and a database (to store the posts in) and you are away.  Many hosting companies will provide blogs for you as a package so you don’t have to worry about the technicalties of setting it up – meaning you can contentrate on your content.

Many people blog to help increase traffic to their main web site.  Blogs provide a great way of increasing back links from relevant content.   No one knows for sure exactly what is required to get to the top spot on Google, but many SEO’s use a variety of techniques to achieve this.   The golden rule in Search Engine Optimisation is that Content is king.    Loads of quality, relevant content on the same subject will, in Googles eyes, establish you as an expert in that area.  Fresh, quirky ideas on your blog will help to increase your visitor count and therefore the quality of your backlinks increases.

There are many more reasons for you to start your own blog, be it communicating with family and friends over a long distance or using it as a diary that you want to share with the world, but its in business that they hold the real value.

An important part of any Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign is to keep your web site fresh and up to date.

Consider the scenario with your car.  Would you purchase a car and just drive it, expecting it to run economically and without problems, or would you take it in for regular services to keep it tuned and oiled?  A web site is no different.

A quick check up on your site doesn’t take long.  For starters you can just check your META information, making sure it is still relative and up to date.  Secondly make sure that there are no dead links on your site.

One of my favourites is checking Google Analytics.  This tells you how your site is performing and what areas of the site possibly need a little more TLC.  Google Analytics is free, so make good use of it!

On top of that, keep checking the performance of your keywords.  Keyword trends can change so its possible that the research you did at the start of your campaign is no longer reliable.

Alexa Ranking is another good way of monitoring your sites success.    Say, for example, you own a cake shop in Manchester.  You look up your competiter and they have an Alexa score of 5,000,000 and you have an Alexa score of 90,000.  This is a pretty good indicator that they are getting alot of your potential business.  Downloading the Alexa toolbar for your browser and spreading the word about your site is definately a good way to give your site a better Alexa ranking.

Across the board, SEO experts agree that if you download the “Alexa Toolbar” and visit your website once a day, encourage friends and colleagues to download the tool bar and visit each other’s websites–that this will increase your Alexa ranking, too. It’s a simple thing to do, but don’t expect dramatic results. You can also flaunt your url in Alexa forums, but the best use of your time is simply to try to get targeted visitors to your website through standard marketing channels.

So there we have it.  It’s true that little and often is a great tonic for helping your site feature higher in the search engine positions so if you are serious about your SEO campaign then make the time to do it.