SEO: What it Is and 3 Ways to Improve It
If you've just begun your quest to learn about how a blog can help you get more customers for your business, then you've probably stumbled upon the acronym SEO. No, it doesn't stand for Secondary Executive Officer. It stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it's the golden key to blogging successfully to improve your ranking on search engines and bring in traffic to your website.
How Search Engines Work
If the Worldwide Web is a huge city with entertainment, shops, and services, search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing are maps of the city. To map it, the search engines send out spiders, also called bots or crawlers, which are automated robots that skulk around and compile a huge, comprehensive list of every single possible destination in town. To get to all of these places, the spiders use links the way cars use streets. Links take the spiders from site to site, zigzagging across hundreds of billions of links leading to millions and millions of locations.
At each location, the spiders read the code on the page and store pieces of it in unfathomably huge data centers all over the world. When Joe Surfer goes to Google and types in "comic book superheroes 1950s," the search engine goes through the database of billions of pieces of information and returns in a second or two with a list of results. Search engines strive to show only the sites that are relevant to the query and to put the most useful results at the top of the list.
So how on earth does the search engine know what's useful and relevant? Ah, that's where this whole thing gets a little complicated and makes rocket science look like arithmetic.
Deciding What’s Relevant
Remember just a few years ago when top search results were often meaningless, cluttered pages stuffed with keywords that had absolutely no context? Those days are long gone, thanks to savvy engineers who dedicated their lives to improving the way search engines interpret data.
Nowadays, extremely complicated algorithms sort through hundreds of variables, called ranking factors, to return results that are truly relevant to what you’re looking for. Sometimes the search engines seem to be reading your mind with their uncanny ability to give you results that contain the exact information you wanted.
A large part of what it all boils down to is the idea that the more popular a website, the better and more relevant information it must contain, and so popularity is a major factor in ranking websites. But popularity isn’t just about how many visitors your site gets. There are loads of factors that go into the popularity equation, and knowing what those factors are can help you optimize your blog to improve your website’s position on the results page.
Three Ways to Improve SEO for Your Blog
The world of SEO can be as simple or as sophisticated as you want it to be. You can learn all sorts of neat little tricks for improving your search engine ranking, but it can get very complicated really fast. A blog on your website is an excellent tool for improving the SEO of your business website. These three simple and effective ways to improve SEO on your blog will help drive more traffic to your website and generate more sales leads for your business.
1. Create high-quality, useful content. The Golden Rule of SEO is to create the kind of experience for users that you would want for yourself. This means content that’s useful, well organized, relevant, and free of errors. Always create blog posts with the user, not the search engine, in mind.
2. Link each blog post to a few other relevant posts to provide a clear mapping path for spiders. Every post should be reachable from at least one static text link embedded in other posts so that every page gets indexed. This will also help provide more information to customers and keep them on your site longer.
3. Produce new content on a regular basis. Search engines like fresh content, and part of your ranking score is based on how often you update your blog. The more you post, the more visible you are to search engines because you’ll have more keywords, more visitors, and more relevant links on your site.
Atomic Content can help you improve SEO for your business website by creating engaging, relevant, and useful content for your blog to educate customers and drive traffic to your site. Contact us today, and let us customize a blogging plan for your business.
