The rise of blogging came about in the late 1990s when websites like LiveJournal and Blogger made easy-to-use tools for non-technical users to share their thoughts, opinions and passions with simple presses of buttons. Over time, savvy businesses began blogging to demonstrate authoritative knowledge of their products and services. At the same time, well-written company blogs created more website engagement with their customers. When a company writes blog posts, the traffic and time spent on their website goes up and bounce rates have a tendency to drop.
Why is Blogging Important For SEO?
A major benefit search engine optimization (SEO) professionals see from blogging is that it can hypercharge optimization efforts. Blogs provide a site with fresh content, relevant internal links, more pages for other sites to link back to, a natural way to incorporate keywords and when shared on social media, it can create social signals that are evaluated in search engine ranking algorithms.
Let’s take a closer look at five reasons you should blog for SEO sake:
Fresh Content
The spirit of searching something on the Internet is to get the most up-to-date, factual information on the topic you are interested in. In 2010, Google’s Caffeine update added an element of “freshness” to particular search results. Freshness results are given to trending topics, scores, schedules for events and other “real-time” events happening. A search for “football scores” will now give you the latest scores at the top of the page and scholarly articles about scoring in football come after.
Search engines must provide results for up-to-date, factual content or they lose trust with the public. Therefore, making regular updates to your company blog will force crawlers to recognize fresh content that search engines are going after. This gets the site noticed, but does your blog content utilize relevant internal links that present more information?
Internal Links
Linking between pages on your site gives the Googlebot a better sense of your site structure, can indicate important pages to search engines and strengthens keywords used in your link’s anchor text.
The important thing to note here is the relevance of pages between internal links. Say your blog post is about a recipe; good internal links would link to related recipes using similar ingredients or blogs about the equipment used to prepare the food.
Backlinks To Blog Posts
Having popular, well-written content that appeals to website visitors is valuable. When you have valuable content for your markets or industry other sites may link back to yours. Links back to your website are one of the highest indicators of popularity to search engines.
Semantic Writing, Keywords And Those With Long Tails
If you’ve done your keyword research, you know what terms “should” attract your visitors to your site. By posting blogs about your products and services, you create more content that uses those search terms to flag search engines that your site is relevant to the user’s query.
Google is looking for well-written, grammatically correct content. The tone of which should be educational, yet somewhat conversational and easy to read. As you write blogs, you have more freedom to expand on topics.
Semantic Writing
If you write in semantic style, you leverage the importance of the keyword you write about by creating a relationship with other words on the page to give meaning to the sentence it’s in.
Let’s say a sports bar in Milwaukee, WI wants to focus on “popular sports bar” as a search term.
Not so semantic example:
“George went to our popular sports bar in Milwaukee.
A semantic example:
“George walked into our popular sports bar in Milwaukee looking for a drink and a place to watch his favorite football team.” Semantically, drink relates to bar, football relates to sports.
Long-tail keywords
Your blogs may rank easier with long-tail search terms as they are specific phrases with less competition. Though long-tail terms may be used less in search, web searchers that do use them are more likely to stick around on your site and convert into customers.
An easy example of a long-tail keyword with a focus on football fans:
“George walked into our popular sports bar in Milwaukee for watching football. He had the bartender turn on ESPN.” (There are semantics and long-tails in this last one).
Spread Blog Content On Social Media
SEOs are to understand that Google doesn’t pass link equity from social media links to a website. Though, we do see businesses’ profiles on Facebook and Twitter in the top rank positions. Active social profiles can rise in search results. In turn, they may influence your website’s own ranks.
Once content is shared on social media, your post is available where Internet users are spending a lot of their time and are more apt to click on items of interest. So, you’ll want to spread your content at every social avenue you can. Through the social chatter of the web, users may find your fresh content quicker, where pages are effectively linked together, knowledgeable enough that others may write about your content and link back … because you wrote like a pro.