If you have a website but don’t have a blog, consider creating one! A blog is a great way to connect with people who share your interests, or to publicize your site or product.
Blogs are easy to create and update. And rich, useful, and original blog content will encourage visitors to come back to your website.
Here are best practices for making the most of your blog:
Create great content
Write well and often. A frequently updated site encourages people to return – as long as your content remains relevant and engaging. A useful post once a week is better than low-quality content published daily. A great idea is to search Google for subjects of interest in your field. If you can’t find a good answer, create a blog post about the subject – chances are that other people are searching for the same thing.
Optimize your images.
Create SEO-friendly featured images for your blog. Featured images, when setup correctly, greatly boost your search engine performance.
Follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Make sure you follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines for creating rich, relevant, and useful content. Similarly, check out recommendations for using images and other rich media in your blog.
Categorize your posts. Labels and tags are a great way to organize your content, and encourage users to browse your blog.
Make sure users (and crawlers) can easily find your blog. Google recommends prominently linking to your blog from your home page, and from other key pages on your site. Consider hosting your blog on your regular site (http://blog.example.com or www.example.com/blog).
If necessary, limit comment spam. Enabling comments on your blog can help create a sense of community and discussion. Unfortunately, some spammers use the comment functionality to flood sites with spam. How to prevent comment spam.
Tips for affiliate sites. Google recommends that all site owners create websites with original content that adds value for users. This is particularly important for sites that participate in affiliate programs. If you do participate in an affiliate program, there are a number of steps you can take to help your site stand out and differentiate it from the crowd. More information about affiliate programs.
Make sure readers and crawlers can find your content
Create descriptive titles for each of your posts. This makes for a better user experience. In addition, the post title is often used to create the unique URL for each post, and this can give search engines valuable information about the content of your page.
Connect with your online community. There’s almost certainly a rich network of bloggers already talking about the subject matter of your site. Visit these blogs, comment on posts, and participate in the discussion. Contribute to web forums devoted to your subject matter. The key is to bring something to the table: Thoughtful comments with useful information will make readers more likely to visit your site.
Publish a feed of your content. Publishing feeds of your content allows users to be notified whenever you update your blog. You can generally do this via a setting in your blogging software. For example, this is the link to our blog feed: https://brightgreenpath.com/feed/
Most services give you the option of publishing a full feed (users can read the full content of your article in their RSS reader) or a partial feed (users see a teaser paragraph in their reader but have to go to your site to read the full article). Rich, full-content feeds make users happy because they can view your content with minimal effort.
Wishing you happy moments this Holiday Season!
Stacy Layman
Director, Marketing and Creative Services
Jacksonville, Florida