Great content can benefit your SEO strategy more than you might think. Here are 5 reasons why.

Whether you’re creating content for your website, for blog articles or online press releases, there should always be one common characteristic: quality. Quality content is not only a representation of your company and culture, it also has the ability to affect your search rankings. Here’s why content is important for SEO:

1. Shareability – Creating valuable content increases the likelihood that readers will want to share it with friends and on their social media platforms. Not only can sharing increase the exposure for your content dramatically, but social shares, such as +1’s, likes and tweets are also signals that can help your content rank higher in the search results.

2. Acquire more high-quality links – Quality has an eye for quality. If your content is truly good, useful and relevant, authoritative sites and individuals will be more likely to link to it. Killer content will help you earn more links.

3. Larger presence – Adding more content to your site increases the size of your website overall, which can make your website appear more authoritative to search engines. The more content you have, the more chances you have for your web pages to come up in the search results. Also, by continuously adding content, you increase the crawl frequency of your website.

4. Keyword opportunities – Creating quality content based on thorough keyword research can provide opportunities for your content to rank better for specific keyword phrases. By researching what terms searchers are using when searching for your products, services, or blog topics, you can more effectively optimize your content to rank for the most valuable terms.

5. Disaster management – By creating quality content, it’s not always about what you get out of it, but what you avoid. Sparse, thin content or content that has overly optimized links can actually get you in trouble with the search engines. Sticking to quality content that will provide value for your readers is the best way to go to avoid search penalties.

Taking the time to create quality content can be rewarding on many levels. It can help to increase your readership, your brand authority, and even your search rankings. Don’t skimp on quality because it can really pay off for your brand. If you would like to learn more about the importance of content in SEO or receive a free assessment of your website content, please contact us.

Blogging has more benefits than you may be aware of, including the ability to enhance your search rankings.

Blogging has increased by 50% among Fortune 500 companies over the past two years. Why the increase? I can tell you that it’s not because they wanted an additional hobby. From an SEO standpoint, adding additional content to your site can increase crawl frequency, will allow you to infiltrate more keyword verticals and can promote back-links; which translate to enhanced rankings and more traffic for businesses. Combined with SEO strategy, blogging can produce wonderful results.

Here are 5 ways you can tie blogging and SEO into your online strategy today:

1. Host your blog under your own domain

To ensure that your website is reaping the traffic and SEO ranking benefits, it is crucial to have your blog hosted under your own domain name. This means that your blog URL should not be separate from your website’s URL, for example, ‘www.yourdomain.com/blog’ is the ideal format.

2. Leverage Your keywords

While still staying within your industry topics, blogging allows you to penetrate more subjects, and in turn, leverage more keywords and phrases. Without overdoing it, integrate keywords and keyword phrases into the body of your blog that relates to your topic. Leverage these keywords in the headline of your articles and in the title tags and meta descriptions as well.

3. Make your content easy to find

Making your content easier to find is not just important for the web crawlers, but is important to help your users more easily access your content as well. Include additional page links (pagination) at the bottom of your pages (ex. 1,2,3,4) so users can navigate from one page to the next. Also, including categories will help to organize your content, and help both users and bots find your content more easily.

4. Add additional post links

Web crawlers find content by way of links, so the more links you have to your content pages, the more chances they have of finding and indexing them. Including more links to additional posts in your blog articles will increase your blog’s overall crawlability. You can add ‘previous’ and ‘next’ links to your blog, as well as add suggested blog links at the end of your posts.

5. Add sharing buttons

Sharing buttons are a great way to get your content more exposure. Since share buttons are also a ranking signal in the algorithms, they can also help to give your content more authority and possibly increase your content’s ranking in the search engine result pages.

Blogging for SEO can be a great way to boost your existing online efforts, but it is a commitment. Staying active, posting consistently and integrating SEO best practices will help you win in the long run. Have questions about blogging or how to tie it into your SEO strategy? Contact us!

Submitted by Erica Machin, Titan Growth