Take two websites from the same industry, one with scarce copy and one with a solid amount of copy supplying useful information to the public. Which one is Google likely to give a better rank?
Obviously there is a lot more to SEO than copy alone, however relevant website copy is a large driver of better website ranks if everything else is set up appropriately.
So why is a blog useful for SEO?
By nature a blog is designed to be updated regularly with new articles. A blog is also categorised and provides information in a very concise and easy to follow manner.
A regularly updated blog with useful, informative articles provides a constant source of new copy for Google to crawl and help rank your site with. Each blog post acts as a new page on your website in the eyes of Google and is crawled, then given ranks on its own merits.
In short, a blog is great for SEO as it provides a source of new pages and new information for Google to rank on it’s search engine.
Keep in mind however that you need to ensure your content relates to your services and that it provides useful information for your customers to read. Also ensure each page includes a decent amount of copy. We suggest a minimum of 300 words.
How to setup your blog to increase your SEO Effectiveness
If you’re looking to use your blog as a part of your website SEO strategy to improve your website ranks we have listed three of our top tips, or best practices to get the most out of your efforts.
Optimise Your Blog Category Structure
The structure of your blog, namely your blog categories will help Google better understand your content and more easily work out what your content is about.
We suggest using parent categories and subcategories to segment your content, whilst labelling it so that Google knows what it is about.
Take a food blogger as an example. Let’s say a food blogger was looking to start a blog about the various recipes they offer.
Below is a suggested outline of how the blog category structure could be setup for a food blogger to help Google understand what each article is about.
- Meat Recipes
- Chicken Recipes
- Beef Recipes
- Pork Recipes
- Fish Recipes
- Vegetarian Recipes
- Tofu Recipes
- Vegetable Recipes
- Fruit Recipes
- Vegan Recipes
- Dessert Recipes
- Cake Recipes
- Cookie Recipes
- Brownie Recipes
- Tart Recipes
The above structure makes it easier for Google and blog readers to quickly find the style of recipe they are looking for. More importantly for SEO, Google is able to identify what each recipe is about e.g “ Meat Recipe > Chicken Recipe”.
Include Page to Page Links
To further help Google understand what each page is about, we suggest adding links within your website copy that feed through to other pages within your website.
You may have noticed within our own website that we often feature links within our copy to other pages within our website. Often we will highlight words such as “web design” and link them to our core web design page so that users can easily go to that page if they want to find out more about our web design services.
These links are great for increasing your ranks as they tell Google exactly what the page he link is going to is about.
Multiple pages linking to our web design page helps both users and Google understand our site better and aids in easy navigation.
Write Useful or Captivating Articles
While not necessarily a “technical” aspect of optimising your blog, the type of content you produce and the way you write your articles is very important in producing the increase in ranks that you seek.
By providing users with informative or captivating content two outcomes are produced. The first being an increase in website traffic, and the second an increase in “backlinks” or “inbound links” to your website.
The increase in website traffic will come from users coming back to your website to read your articles, or through word of mouth encouraging new users to check your website out.
Increased website traffic, particularly blog traffic, is a very good outcome as users that comprise this type of traffic are typically already interested in your products or services and are more likely to interact with your business in the form of a purchase or enquiry.
An increase in backlinks will come from blogs, social media, or other websites linking back to your articles that they find interesting or informative.
More backlinks, particularly backlinks relative to your services or industry will have an immense positive effect on your SEO and will improve your website ranks for keywords relative to the articles that are linked to from external sources.
Our articles like the one you are currently reading are aimed at the informative or educational branch of blog posts.
We create articles that help business owners learn about the various aspects of web design and online marketing in order to improve their online presence and to arm themselves with the information needed to make informed decisions relative to their websites.
