People ask me all the time – “What can I do to rank higher on Google?” Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet to ranking higher in Google and other search engines. One of the easiest and most effective things that you can do is blogging. Today I’m going to go through a couple of the reasons why a blog can help improve your search engine ranking.
NOT JUST A STATIC PAGE ANY LONGER
One of the things that search engines look at when ranking a site, is how relevant a site is. Relevancy has to do with how appropriate your content is to a given search term or phrase. A site that is content rich in keywords or common search terms will be viewed more relevant. The more relevant your site is for a search term or phrase – the higher it will rank.
One benefit of having a blog is that it increases the number of pages that search engines have to crawl and index. Let’s say your site started as a simple 5 page static website. At that point, search engines only have those 5 pages of keywords to determine if your site matches what the user is searching for. Each new blog post becomes a new page to be crawled and indexed.
Take our website for example. We started with a static 5 page website. However, now that we’ve had a blog going for a few months, we’ve added over 20 additional pages to be indexed. Each of these pages has our sites keywords mixed into the copy of the page, give us a higher ranking in the top search engines.
When writing your blog posts, use your sites keywords throughout the article. By doing so, more pages will match possible search terms.
INCOMING LINKS
One of the key things that search engines, especially Google, pay attention to when indexing a site, is the number of incoming links. An incoming link is a link from another website that points to your website. Once your blog gets started, other leading websites from your industry can link to related articles.
There are also several popular blog index websites that your blog can be submitted to. Many of the websites are ranked very high with Google, and are crawled on a regular basis. Not to mention, they generally have a higher traffic rate, which can increase the number of people who view your posts. Posting a comment and a link to your blog article on your Facebook or Twitter pages increases the incoming links even more, and increases the number of people reading your post. Each of these new incoming links can bring your site higher in the search results for your targeted keywords and phrases.
COMMON CONCERNS AND HESITATIONS
When I talk to clients about doing a blog, the main concern they express is they don’t think they have time to write the blog posts. That’s a very understandable concern; however, it really doesn’t take that much time to put a blog together. You can spend as little as a half hour a week working on your blog articles and get results.
You can also stockpile your blog posts and blogging ideas. One week you might have extra time that you can spend writing an additional post. The article can easily be saved for another week. Simply set the publish date for any extra articles to be a date in the future.
Keep in mind while you’re writing your posts, that no one knows your business and your industry better than you. Use your blog to showcase your knowledge and expertise in your industry. With a blog, you can go beyond just a simple sales pitch, and explain in great detail why someone should do business with you.
Before you launch your blog I would advise having a couple of posts already written and published, as well as a couple more that can be published in the first couple weeks that your blog is live. If a visitor goes to a blog and only sees one or two posts, they might get the impression that the blog isn’t popular or worth their time.
Do you currently have a blog? Have you seen an increase in your search engine ranking? How has it helped you out?