Unless you’re talking about a specifically personal blog, most of the blogs you read are written with a motive other than providing you with information. The very best ones manage to provide you with something interesting to read, information that you can actually use and, at the same time, advertise something that the author wants you to buy. If you’re interested in using your blog as a way to sell items, consider the following tips to make your effort more successful.
4 Important Tips for Building Great Blogs
1. It Has to Be Good
Google and the other search engines in the world thrive or fail based on providing relevant links to the people who use them. If people are constantly getting sent to sites that are nothing but marketing, the search engine providing those links will not last long.
In order to end up with good search engine placement, you have to provide something interesting to your readers. It also has to be well written, grammatically correct and not plagiarized. The bottom line is that you need a good blog, whether you’re advertising something with it or not. If it’s boring marketing material, people aren’t going to be interested in it and search engines are not going to rank it highly.
2. Update Frequently
Google tends to prefer websites that are updated on a regular basis. This means that you have to have content added to your blog fairly frequently. Ideally, you should be adding content at least once a week. Some very active blogs add content several times per day. Once you abandon a blog, however, it’s not going to show up in the search engines for long.
One solution to making certain that your blog is updated on a regular basis is using the automatic update features in WordPress. This allows you to add as many posts as you like and to schedule them to publish at regular intervals, automating the entire process.
3. Keywords
Keywords – more specifically, including keywords – is an area where many novice webmasters have a lot of trouble. The problem is easy enough to understand. The search engines do not want to index content that is nothing but keyword-stuffed nonsense. This was actually a big problem when the Internet first started becoming a popular commercial medium.
On the other hand, the search engines need to know what a given site is about and they use keywords to determine that. Using keywords intelligently and ethically can help you to get indexed.
Most of the time, search engine optimization experts will recommend using keywords approximately 1 percent of the time throughout a given post. This would mean, for example, that if you were blogging to get your site noticed for the keyword “bike tires“, you would try to include the words “bike tires” once every 100 words. This is actually not terribly difficult to do and you can write an intelligent, worthwhile article keeping with this frequency.
It’s okay to go over that frequency limit, provided that you’re actually writing something that’s relevant to the keyword and that it naturally flows into the text. If you start to force it, however, it becomes obvious and the search engines will ignore you.
4. Comments
Allowing people to comment on your blog posts is a great way to encourage repeat visitors to your site. It’s also a fun way to make your blog more interesting, whether or not it’s particularly useful for search engine optimization.
One of the hardest things to achieve with search engine optimization is getting linked to by other sites. Having an interesting site with a lot of community involvement is one of the easiest ways to get people to link to your site, allowing you to overcome this hurdle. Most WordPress Themes have threaded comments built into them.