March 2018 - ThinkDMG

There are currently over 440 million blogs online. It sounds like an unbelievable number and if you’re starting your own blog, it means competition is a real thing. How do you set your blog apart from others? How do you get regular traffic and – more importantly – some kind of return on the time you put into building it?

There are various plans of attack that you can consider to increase your blogs visibility. A combination of all of these strategies and perseverance can help make your blog stand out from the pack. We’ll look at some of the great things you can do today to get your company’s blog in front of the right audience.

Fast Loading Times

If a blog doesn’t load quickly, its not going to retain visitors. If you’ve ever visited a site that took more than three seconds to load, you may find that you’re already losing interest. And even if you have the most patient user base ever, most web crawlers time out in less than three seconds and unreliable speeds lead to lower rankings in search engine result pages.

It may be as simple as a call to your site hosting service in order to get more processing power allocated to your blog. Much like having a luxury automobile would be pointless if he can’t actually drive over 20mph, having an amazing blog with a slow server defeats the purpose.

Keep It Regular

Regular content delivery is key to successful blogging. We can’t imagine watching a serial TV show that may or may not air each week, and most users won’t bother returning to a randomly updated blog. A big part of that 440 million blogs are basically randomly updates, sometimes with years of space in between; this pattern does not retain viewers.

However, its not always easy to make time to manually release an article each week or month. Instead, tools exist to allow you to schedule your blogs posts to automatically post. This way you can prep months at a time and then leave the blog on auto-pilot to post the new items as needed.

KeyWords

When starting a blog, you should have a clear idea of what the keywords you focus on will be. Think about what someone might type into Google relating to your company. Now think about what you phrases you’d like your site to appear in response to a Google query. Try to use these phrases naturally in your article. Don’t think that more is better. Stuffing the keywords into every sentence does not work. Google can detect unnatural badly formatted text. You’re best off just writing naturally and making a point to use the keywords when they appear naturally in context.

Below are a few popular tools for keyword research:

Incorporate internal linking

The sidebar of your blog and links to related blog posts on your blog are excellent ways of increasing traffic. If you wrote a past article on your site that relates to the current post, link up some keywords to it. This can help people to delve deeper into your blogs content and grow to appreciate all the effort that went into it.

Feature posts are also a great way to route traffics from any of your posts to one of particular interest or value. Many WordPress themes have a side panel with featured posts or recommended posts along the bottom. You can use these to drive traffic to specific topics that relate to your niche or help convery visitors into customers.

Responsive Design

Nothing drives mobile users away like a clunky, slow desktop site that pretends the smartphone doesn’t exist. Your site should look great on a tiny iPhone screen, an Android tablet and an HD 1080p desktop computer monitor. Many plugins exist to convert existing themes to responsive themes. A responsive theme basically grows or shrinks to fit the available space and thus looks great no matter what kind of device is browsing your site.

Interact With Your Audience

The comment section on your blog is not just there for people to give you blind praise on a great article. End articles with a question that invites personal opinion. You may find that you have some great discussions in the comments sections of your blog. Even questions that may cause a bit of debate or in-depth explanation of a point of view can help draw traffic to your site.

Replying to comments on your blog should be part of your regular routine. It will make potential customers feel more loyal to your brand when they see that you actually took the time to respond to their query.

Search Engine Optimization

One of the most difficult aspects of making your blog more popular is search engine optimization. This is not something that can be done quickly with a few clicks. Using natural keyword placement can help but other things such as backlinking, long tail search keywords and low competition keywords for niche items can also help.

Bringing It All Together

Feeling a bit overwhelemed? Don’t be. The hard part of blogging is having good content. If you have that, we can help you with all the rest of the details. Fill out our contact form today and put our team of experts to work for your company.

Its no secret that having quality content is more important than ever. Google search results drive traffic and traffic converts into revenue. For this reason, many businesses have create ambitious posting schedules in an attempt to draw people to their site.

However, these plans don’t always work out to the company’s benefit. We look at how the length and style of a post can help your site to be well positioned in Google and also to establish your company as an industry leader with valuable content.

How Long Should a Post Be?

Posts online are usually considered to be either long form (or long content) – consisting of more than 500 words – or short content – being less than 500 words. There are pros and cons to both. Deciding on the length often depends on the point of the article. We’ll talk about both and when to elect either a short or long blog post.

Long Form Posts

In the past, long form posts were not seen as a valuable SEO marketing tool. As casual browsers might want to read a quick article, the feeling was that writing anything longer wouldn’t really be consumed. Additionally, search engines have specific algorithms for determining the “quality” of a page, and longer isn’t necessarily better.

The value of long form posts comes from the fact that you can deliver valuable content to your users. Long posts let you go deep into technical issues, tell an engaging story or present an interesting interview. Some companies have even found success with “gated long posts”, where a user must sign up to a mailing list in order to access the entire post. Long form posts can go a long way to establishing you as an industry expert.

Short Form Posts

Shorter posts – those of under 500 words – are great for quick and interesting reads, sharing news about an event or announcing a new product or release. Since they take less time to produce, you can produce more, which helps you possibly strike gold on some unexpected interest of your readers and also help establish a better search engine ranking.

The Role of Quality

You probably remember a time in the early 2000’s when ever site had a sidebar filled with randomly sized words. There was a time when things like keyword stuffing, content scraping and other poor substitutes for content could actually help a page to rank better. Things have changed since then, and none of these strategies are going to help your page be considered “high quality” by Google or any other analytics bots that check out your page. Duplicate content is also bad.

If your page is a cut and paste collage of other articles, these systems are able to pick that up. Even worse, if your competitors or clients notice you are doing things like this, your reputation will be damage irrevocably.

Don’t forget, your Google ranking means nothing if your human readers don’t see you as a source of reliable and valuable information. There are no shortcuts in producing quality content.

Posting Schedules

Scheduled automated posting systems are popular and they can make maintaining a website easier. Content can be quickly developed at one point in time and then automatically released slowly over time. These systems can be great but they also present a trap. In a rush to fill a posting schedule, some companies put out filler posts. Others sit on exciting news just because it didn’t come in on time for their posting schedule.

These decisions can also impact the length of the posts. It’s great to maintain a schedule, but also important to leave time for creativity and unexpected news.

Developing Quality Posts

A great practice for both long or short form posts is to start by writing a basic outline. Start with sub headings and main talking points. Each post should be easily explained in 1-2 sentences. If explaining it becomes more complex than that, it might be a better idea to divide the ideas up into several posts.

Always try to imagine what your potential clients will take away from this post. Does it really have something to say that hasn’t already been said? Does it answer a question people often Google related to your industry?

These are the posts that work on both levels; valuable to human readers and well ranked by search engines. No one likes to open a post that poses a question, and then – ten “filler paragraphs” later – basically tells them, “Do research to find the right answer for you!”

Article Length Recommendations

Buffer: recommends the ideal blog post length should be 1,600 words.
CoSchedule: recommends the ideal blog post length should be 2,500 words.
Hubspot: recommends the ideal blog post length should be 2,250 to 2,500 words.
Moz: recommends the ideal blog post length should be 1,125 words.
ClickSeed: recommends the ideal blog post length should be 1,000 words.
Yoast: recommends the minimum word count is 300 in order to rank, but ideal blog post length should be 1,000 words.

Brining It All Together

As you can see, developing quality content is not as easy as it sounds. It could be that you’re an industry expert with lots of knowledge to share, but you don’t know where to start. If that’s your situation, fill out our contact form now. Put all that knowledge to work today, driving people to your company online all around the world.