How to Blog for SEO, Google Rankings and More

By Brandon Cornett
© 2012, All rights reserved

What are the SEO benefits of blogging? How can you blog your way to SEO traffic and visibility? Those are some of the questions we will address in today's lesson. Here's what you need to know about blogging, search engine optimization, and the connection between them.

Audience: This tutorial is intended for readers who are new to blogs, SEO or both. By the time you finish reading this article, you'll know how to integrate blogging into your search engine optimization program. And you'll realize that it's a match made in heaven.

A blog would make an excellent addition to your online marketing program. Blogging programs simplify the publishing process, which allows you to grow your web presence like never before. They can also be used to support your search engine optimization (SEO) program. In this lesson, I'll offer some SEO blog tips to help you get the most out of your blogging efforts.

How Does a Blog Help With SEO?

What are the SEO benefits of blogging? How does a blog support your SEO campaign? And for that matter, how does it support your Internet marketing program in general? Here's what you need to know.

Once you get past the technical aspects of a search engine optimization campaign, the real work comes down to two things: You need to publish quality content on a regular basis, and you need to promote that content as much as possible in order to attract links.

Now, a blog obviously can't help you write your content. But it helps a lot on the publishing and promoting side. So when you blog for SEO purposes, you'll save a lot of time and energy. You can publish new content as quickly as you can type it up.

Frequency of Publishing: More is More

You'll get the most out of your SEO program if you publish new content as often as possible. This helps you in several ways. It adds value to your website. It keeps your readers coming back more frequently. And it shows the search engines you have an active website with a strong emphasis on content generation. All of that content also helps you acquire links from other websites, which is a key factor for SEO success.

How does a blog help you with these things? As mentioned earlier, the blogging program will do most of the technical work for you. You write your content and click the publish button, and the blogging platform does the rest. This allows you to spend more time writing quality content. Keep this in mind when you blog for SEO purposes. Anything you can do to improve the quality of your material will pay dividends in the long run.

Quality is clearly the most important factor when publishing information online. But quantity is also important. If you want to succeed with your blog SEO campaign, you need to combine both of these factors. You need to publish information your readers will find useful, interesting and engaging. And you need to give them new content on a regular basis, to keep them coming back. This will help you with visitor retention, traffic generation, keyword proliferation, link building, and overall search engine visibility.

Establishing "link popularity" is a necessary step in any search engine optimization campaign. The best way to acquire these all-important links is by creating high-quality content that naturally attracts citations. Keep this in mind when you blog for SEO purposes. You want other publishers to say, "Wow, this information is incredibly useful and my readers will love it." This is how you get new links to your blog or website on a regular basis.

You must work hard to publish superior content -- better than anything your competitors are currently publishing. And you need to do this on a regular basis. A blog helps you with this aspect of SEO by simplifying the publishing process.

Promoting Your Blog Content

Writing great web content is a passive form of promotion. You are passively promoting the content by building value into it from the start. Over time, this will help you acquire links from other blogs and websites. This is an important aspect of any blog SEO program. But you should also be active in your promotional efforts. Once you've built up a good base of content on your blog, you should start promoting it to key audiences.

Where do you start? You can start with online publishers, journals and websites that cover your particular subject matter. For instance, if I've just published the results of a survey about mortgage loan criteria, I could promote it to any number of real estate news websites.

How does this help my blog SEO campaign? It helps me attract links from reputable websites. This will go a long way toward improving my search engine visibility and rankings. When you combine this strategy with the easy publishing process associated with blogs, you can begin to see the long-term value. It can have a snowball effect over time.

Social Networks + Blog = SEO Powerhouse

You can also use social networking websites to accomplish everything we've just talked about. For instance, we learned that the fundamental steps of an SEO campaign are writing and promoting content. Social media websites can help you on the promotional and networking side of things. You can take your SEO blogging efforts to the next level by tapping into the world of social networks.

There are two ways to accomplish this. The first thing you should do is make it easy for people to share your blog content through their social networks. You can do this quickly and easily by adding social-sharing buttons to your blog.

Blogging programs make it really easy to add a common element to every single page. So you only have to add the button code in one spot for it to appear across your entire blog.

You can generate these buttons individually, or by using a free service like AddThis.com. This allows people to share your content with their own social circles at the click of a button. You can see the value of this, from a blog and SEO perspective. It will help you attract more readers and links, and thereby achieve a higher level of performance in the search engines.

That's one way to use social media to support your blog SEO campaign. There's another strategy you can use, and it's more proactive in nature. You can use websites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube to proactively promote your quality content. Granted, it helps to build up an audience first. But once you have a certain number of fans, friends and followers, you can showcase your new content to a large audience quickly and easily.

As you blog for SEO purposes, make sure you are tapped into the social networks. Add those sharing buttons to the top of your blog posts, and start building up a base of followers and readers.

Have Questions About Blogging or Search Engine Optimization?

If you have questions about anything we've discussed in this tutorial, I encourage you to visit our discussion forums. You can register for free, and you can post any question you have about blogs, SEO, or Internet marketing in general. I will do my best to answer your questions and get you pointed in the right direction. It's a way for you to benefit from my background with blogging and search engine optimization.