Creating a blog for your company provides opportunities for having conversations around the topics that brought your visitors to your blog/website. And attracting more traffic means answering more questions about the topic you know and love. During the course of answering all of these questions, you'll realize you've created a nice, low-cost lead pipeline. In fact, a recent eMarketer article reports that the blog continues to be one of the most cost-effective means of creating new leads. And a great way to attract traffic to a website is through search engine optimization, or SEO. Today's post centers on three blogger SEO tips on how to attract traffic to your blog or website.
1. Free Google Blogger SEO Tools
When you're writing your blog posts and especially post titles, it's important to include popular phrases and terms specific to your line of work. Including these "keyword phrases" more throughout each article helps Google deliver more searchers to your doorstep. Google has several free tools that always come in handy:
- Google Insights for Search - This search aggregate tool can help you spot trends in what people are searching for over time and by geographic location. Make investments in future SEO traffic by writing about topics that are gaining in overall popularity.
Insights for Search provides search trending analytics.
Wonder Wheel shows relationships between search keywords.Wonder Wheel - In Google's mind, all search terms are related. Blogging about closely related topics over time will create signals of authority from your site that Google references in its search algorithms. You can access Google's Wonder Wheel through any standard search result by selecting Show options from the top navigation, then Wonder Wheel from the secondary navigation that appears.
- Search Keyword Tool - Still the best free SEO tool out there, this Google tool allows you to see which keywords people are searching for most and how much competition there is to rank highly for each term. Bloggers typically have the the most luck attracting SEO traffic by selecting keyword phrases that are the ideal mix of high volume and low competition.
The Keyword Tool shows potential traffic and competition for target keyword phrases.
2. SEO Site Tools Chrome Extension
SEO Site Tools is a new extension for the Chrome web browser that quickly allows you to compare the relative SEO value of a web page. I had the opportunity to provide some beta testing to Twitter friend and fellow blogger, Carter Cole, who recently launched his new SEO tool on his blog and SEOmoz. SEO Site Tools presents standard SEO scores (e.g., AlexaRank, MozRank and Google's PageRank) as well as all sorts of other SEO bells and whistles, such as features for social media and SEO suggestions. Tools like Carter's help bloggers aggregate SEO research into one tool, helping them to quickly assess their ability to rank for a particular keyword.
Carter Cole's new Chrome SEO extension
3. Create Excellent, Linkable Content
Many traditional on-page SEO tactics just aren't as effective as they used to be. Optimizing the placement of keywords throughout your site provides less benefit than it once did. Instead, the overall trust and authority of the site plays a much more important factor on how a page ranks for Google. And the ultimate signal for Google for trust and authority is an inbound link from a related website. If people with similar sites are including links to your site in their content, it's a pretty good indicator that they're referencing you as an expert. Creating plenty of excellent, linkable content is one of the best ways to attract maximum SEO traffic to your blog.
Blogging on behalf of your business can be a great way to establish credibility and obtain low-cost leads. But SEO is just one of many tactics to attract traffic to your website. And there are many more tips out there. Leave a comment below to share your blogger tips, SEO or otherwise, on attracting traffic to your blog/website.