A well written blog can form an invaluable part of any social media strategy, allowing you to interact with your target market and share industry information, tips and expertise. By creating a regularly updated and informative blog your business will be able to establish a reputation as an industry authority, and in so doing increase your brand awareness. However, no matter how insightful and informative your blog posts may be, if they do not show up in the search results they are only ever likely to attract a handful of readers. So what is the secret to blog optimisation? Here are a few tips:

Use appropriate keywords
As with website optimisation, keywords are all important. Use phrases that represent niches in your market as this will shelter your blog from the more competitive mainstream searches your industry may attract. For example, rather than writing a blog post with the keyword ‘car insurance’ – a highly sought after keyword, try something a little more precise like ‘car insurance for a Ford Focus’. There will be far fewer sites competing for the latter keyword, and as a result, a well optimised blog will have a far higher chance of ranking.

Links
If you have any idea about website optimisation then you will already be aware that the search engine spiders index web pages by crawling from link to link. It is essential you include anchor text links in each of your blog posts. These should link to pages within your website or to other blog posts you have written. This will help not only with the optimisation of your blog but will also work towards website optimisation. It is usually best to include one or two links in each post; anymore and it will all start to look a bit spammy.

Write frequent posts
This technique will benefit human readers as well as website optimisation. Loyal readers will enjoy coming back to find relevant and regular blog posts whilst, for the purposes of SEO, regular posting will keep those search engine spiders coming back for more.

Promotion via social media
Social media is going to have an increasingly influential role in website optimisation as social signals are being worked into search engine algorithms all the time. As well as promoting your blog on your own social network pages, encourage others to do the work for you by including Facebook and Twitter ‘share buttons’. The new Google +1 button should also be used.

By following these simple tips you have every chance of writing a high ranking blog post. For further website optimisation information and advice the team at Designer websites are always happy to help. Call our website optimisation team on 0845 272 6813.