Build a Better Business Blog, One Block At a Time

NB: This is the 7th installment in The Inspired Solo’s Build a Better Business Blog in One Month series. Designed to help solo lawyers and other professionals boost their blog’s performance, the series consists of a daily lecture and task (or tasks) that focus on one “blog improvement project” at a time. Each post in the series is tagged with “[BBBB1]“. You can start the program at any time. Catch up with other BBBB1 posts here.

Day 7 Lecture: SEO 101 for Business Blogs, Part 2

A quick review: In yesterday’s combined lecture/tasks installment on SEO for business blogs, we talked about the importance of understanding your blog’s primary focus, your TR’s problem and mindset, and the most likely keywords the TRs would use to look up someone offering the services you provide. We also discussed what the blogger’s mindset must be in order to be successful in any traffic-increasing SEO tasks: that is to say, we must remember what Google’s job is — to help out the searchers, not us (the site owners).

Today’s lecture will get into more specifics about SEO for business blogs, and give you some practical tips for working more SEO into your pages and your site, as well as some offsite tasks you can perform to ramp up your incoming links and traffic.

It’s a sad fact of life that the popular get more popular, while the neglected … don’t. It’s true in high school, and it’s true on the web, too. Our aim is to increase targeted traffic to our business blogs, and the more we attract, the more we will attract in the future. Simple enough equation, right?

But how the heck do we get there?

Google Is Not the Be-All, End-All of Your Blog’s Traffic (But It Is Important)

That subheading (well, the part before the parenthetical anyway) might look like blasphemy against our beneficient Google Overlords, but there you have it. Google is an important part of your traffic, but it’s not the only part. We need a comprehensive approach to increasing our sites’ visibility in SERPs (Search Engine Results Placement) lists, and as luck would have it, the things that we do to increase our sites’ popularity and traffic will also have the effect of raising our sites’ placement in those all-important Google results.

Remember the job of Google is to present the most valid, interesting, reliable, accurate, and relevant websites in response to a given keyword search. Google doesn’t hate you, in other words. It just doesn’t have what it needs to make the determination that your site has a better response than those other sites that come before you.

So how do we give Google or any other search engine what it needs to do its job? The answer is: by providing the best response, and putting it out on the web in a way that tells Google it’s the best response.

Optimize For Pages — Not Your Site As a Whole

No, you’re not imagining things. I wrote about this same concept and in much the same words in yesterday’s lecture. I’m repeating it today because it’s that important, and because it’s relevant to the day’s tasks.

We’re going to skip (for now) the very first part of the equation which is “provide the best answer.” For purposes of this SEO discussion, I’m going to assume you can write competently, you know your stuff, and you can communicate that stuff in the context of that competent writing. (We’ll touch on these issues throughout the month, though, so don’t worry if you’re afraid your writing isn’t up to snuff. There are lots of things we can do to improve that, too.)

So, we’re going to assume you have a draft of a post that answers your TR’s question, or one of them. It’s well-written, with proper spelling, punctuation and grammar, and there are no typos. Now what?

Remember this: we’re optimizing the PAGE, not the site as a whole. What that means is that we’re only concerned with making this one post — which will be seen on your site as a page unto itself, remember — the most highly-optimized page around for this keyword search.

What keyword search? Well, you’ll know that if you’ve done your homework from yesterday’s post. A quick recap: brainstorm some ideas, based on your superior knowledge of your targeted readers’ situation, problem, and immediate needs, then expand that list by using free tools such as Wordtracker’s keyword research tool.

When you know what keyword(s) you’re optimizing for, now you can begin the work of actually optimizing the page.

A Basic SEO Checklist for Business Bloggers

Here’s the good stuff — step by step, the things you can do onsite to maximize your blog post’s chances at a high first-page result for your optimized terms. (The following section will explore things you can do offsite to increase your rankings. But first things first — we start with our blog post.)

1. Realize that just by using a blog, you’re ahead of the game already. Search engines love blogs because they’re text-centric, with headings and titles that make it clear what they’re about, and they’re frequently updated, which makes them current. So – pat yourself on the back for being a good business person, and move on to the next step.
2. Review your post one more time for clarity and word choice. Are you communicating at a level that your TR will understand? Have you used any lingo or jargon that you don’t define? Do your thoughts logically flow from one main point to the next?
3. Keep one main topic for the post and one main point per paragraph. Don’t confuse the issue — or the search engines — by dashing off into tangents. Stay focused on the topic.
4. Examine your post’s structure. Does the post as a whole make sense when looked at as a whole? Where could you insert headings to add more structure?
5. Create headings and subheadings using heading tags. <h2> and <h3> tags (or simply using the styles function on a WYSIWYG editor) create headings and subheadings; these add structure to your post and help both the reader and the search engines understand what you’re writing about in your post. There should be only one <h1> tag on your post, and that’s your title. Use smaller headings or tags for your post’s body. Don’t overuse them, though — you want to aid the reader, not annoy her.
6. Optimize your title. Make sure your keyword appears in the title to your post. However, there’s an art to using keywords without overusing them; say the title out loud to make sure it sounds like something one would actually say. (That’s a fairly reliable way to double-check just about any blog writing, by the way.)
7. Optimize your headings. Again, within the bounds of normal usage, you would like your keywords to appear in your headings, as well. Don’t use them so often, however, that it begins to look like keyword stuffing.
8. Use your keywords in your post. Here, too, the “read out loud” test will help you out considerably. If you find yourself thinking “this sounds weird” ask yourself if your keywords are being overused. Overuse of keywords — also called “keyword stuffing” — is the antithesis of what the search engines are looking for, and it can get your site bumped down, or even off, the list altogether. It’s most important to have keywords in headings and titles, so if you have too many in the post itself, feel free to edit them down.
9. Put the keywords in the URL. Not everyone will be able to do this, because not every blog platform allows the freedom to edit each post’s URL or permalink. (WordPress does, as of 2.7 (possibly earlier, not sure), so that’s another reason to go with the full-fledged WordPress platform hosted on your own domain.) But if your platform does permit this, edit the URL so that it contains at least a portion of your keyword phrases. If your platform doesn’t allow you to edit the permalink structure on a per-post basis, then make doubly sure you’ve got your permalinks set to post title, if possible, and make sure your title is well optimized.
10. Strengthen your outgoing links. Make sure you’re linking to reliable, valuable, and highly-ranked sites. Check out each linked-to site thoroughly before you send your traffic there; make sure it offers what you say it does, and make absolutely sure that it’s not a “bad neighborhood” — i.e., a link farm or black hat site.
11. Optimize your anchor text with your keywords. It’s more important, actually, for the links others give you to contain your keywords as anchor texts, but the Golden Rule applies here, too: do unto others as you’d have them do unto you. No “click here” or vague anchor text phrases as links, please — use actual keywords and explain where you’re sending your traffic.
12. Craft the best title you can. This is not just good SEO practice — it’s good copywriting practice, too. Make it slightly longer than you think it should be — longer titles capture attention. And make sure you deliver on the title’s promise in the post body. Finally, tweak the headline so that it grabs the TR all the way from the search engine page. We’ll talk more about how to write great headlines later in the month.
13. Keep your post short enough for optimal page reading. Unless you’re writing a longer pillar article (and even those should not usually be manifesto-length), aim for a post that’s between 400 and 750 words long. (Obviously, I’m not following my own advice in this regard with these posts, but that’s because this is a special situation — a series built around a fairly complex topic — but truth to tell, if I had an extra day, I’d have broken this up into two posts. But we need to stay on schedule!)
14. Consider optimizing for one or two secondary keywords. Be cautious here — most experts believe that aiming for too many keywords just weakens your results across the board. But if you’ve got the right topic, the right slant, and enough room, you can try to work in another keyword phrase or two into your post. Follow the same rules as above for each set of keywords you choose.

Off-Site Techniques for Bloggers In Search of Better SEO Results

When we talk about off-site SEO, we’re talking about things that happen off the page you write (i.e., the post) that increase your site’s rankings in the SERPs. Mainly, of course, we’re talking about incoming links.

But you want to be careful here. You don’t want just any links. If that sufficed, we could just buy a bunch of links from the friendly neighborhood link farm and be done with it. You want quality incoming links, preferably ones that contain your keywords in the anchor text (the text that’s underlined in a link), and you want them from the best, most reliable sites around.

How do you get them? Not with a checklist approach, that’s for sure. This kind of SEO depends on something that can’t be tasked out, per se — relationships with other bloggers.

Tomorrow we’re going to revisit some of the ideas in an old post of mine about creating community, and much of what I have to say there will be relevant to this discussion. So bookmark this post, and maybe come back to it after we go through tomorrow’s topic.

But in a nutshell, you want to create relationships with bloggers in your “blog community” — people who write about your subject in different geographical areas, for instance, as well as bloggers who write about related subjects.  Make a list of these folks, and get to know a few.

It’s perfectly OK to email another blogger, letting him or her know about the post you just wrote, giving them the link and hoping for a link yourself. Nothing wrong with that at all. Just be careful how you do it. Don’t demand — don’t be rude — and don’t expect, either. Just … inform.  Many times you’ll get nothing in response. Sometimes you’ll get lucky.

Here’s another reason why it’s so important to have the best headline you can — because by doing so, you make it easy for the other blogger to give you a keyword-rich anchored link. If the headline contains your keywords, all the other guy has to do is simply copy and paste the headline into his or her blog post, and create the link.

And make sure you reciprocate, too. Bloggers generally like making friends of other bloggers but like any relationship, if it starts to feel too one-sided, that’s no good. So be sure to give out the link love as often as you request it, at least.

Task: Optimize One  Blog Post For Selected Keywords

This was a no-brainer, right?

Go through your post archives for a relatively recent post that you think you can improve upon with the careful application of these SEO techniques — making sure it’s one you can actually add to, substantively speaking. Go to work on it — changing the headline, the headings, editing the text and the URL, making as many changes as you think appropriate to optimize the heck out of this page for selected keywords.

Next, republish the revised post, and publish a new, second post alerting to the fact that the original post has been  updated. Make sure you link to the newly revised post (with keyword anchor text, of course!).

For extra credit, make note of your past stats for this page in Google Analytics, and then keep track of what happens  in the future.