Link Building

As an SEO consultant I am frequently asked about blogging as a business venture. Whether adding a blog to a website will increase search traffic, help convert sales, or improve search engine rankings.

To answer succinctly – yes: but only if you are committed. There is nothing worse than finding a website with good design and layout, keyword rich and engaging content only to look at their blog to find their last entry was six months ago about their new website launch and nothing else.

The idea of a blog is not just to create it and be done with it – Google does not award points to websites for simply having a blog. The reason blogs are known for helping websites gain rankings is because they produce fresh and unique content.

It is SEO best practise to frequently update your website, as Google sees this as you ensuring your content is relevant and up to date with the market. A simple and easy way to do this, without having to change content around on your product pages and risk losing traffic from words currently converting, is by writing blog posts. In turn you can be rewarded with higher page authority and therefore better rankings.

Continually adding blog posts also means you are continually adding pages to your website. Each new page you add can be seen as a sales person and the more sales people you send out, the more likely you are to get a return.

When Google recognises that you have updated your website frequently they send out crawlers more often to index pages on in your website. This means there are more of your websites’ pages to be found within Google search results.

You can increase the chances of your content being found further by choosing keyword rich titles and including these keywords throughout your text. You can determine which keywords are being searched upon by your customers in Australia as well as globally by using Google Adwords Keyword Tool. This tools allows you to research keywords and determine how often people are searching for those words.

For example if you are wanting to blog about the importance of using a harness when training puppies, you could title your blog “Puppy Training”.  However, while this keyword may gain thousands of searches, it is very vague. Increase your chances of being found and converting traffic (either into sales, to register for a newsletter, or simply to leave their details) by choosing titles that have a mixture of different search volumes (people that are actually looking for this phrase) and relevance to your topic – ‘Training Puppies with Harnesses’.

Another important factor to consider is where you will host your blog. It can be created on your website, as a subdomain, or on a separate website altogether. It is strongly recommended that you create your blog within your current navigation and not as a subdomain or on a separate website. This would make the url YourPageDomain.com/Blog (Puppy.com/Blog).

The url to a subdomain blog page would be Blog.YourPageDomain.com (Blog.Puppy.com) which is essentially a completely separate site. The third option is to host your blog on another site such as tumblr which would make the link YourBlogName.Tumblr.com (BrisbanePuppyTraining.Tumblr.com). Either of the second two options will signal to Google not to count the traffic from your blog in the total traffic for the rest of your website. By sending your traffic to a separate website you are diluting your traffic and therefore your authority.

To summarise, a blog can definitely help increase your search engine rankings, increase traffic to your website, and convert visitors – but you have to be committed. Updating your blog frequently is key; but it is also vital to write engaging, unique, and keyword rich content.

Dee Barizo poses the question, “how many links is enough?”  This is a very good question as most clients when they learn about link building want to quantify the effort involved with undertaking such a task.  Usually SEO professionals answer, “it depends”.

It depends on what words you want to rank for and how competitive those words are.

In Dee’s article, he makes a very good point that most other sites were not actively building links.  It was a surprise to him that SEO is not as competitive as he first thought simply because most sites aren’t doing it.  This in turn made it much easier to rank for competitive terms through the use of link building, although Dee’s client had a head start by being on page 2 or 3 of search engine results for specifc terms.

This reinforces my observations that many marketing managers and website owners are not committed to a long term SEO strategy.  Most people see SEO as a tactical implementation, rather than an ongoing program of work that realizes the full benefits. This is largely due to, in my mind at least, marketing managers being focused on “campaigns”.  Once a campaign is completed, the microsite or content is thrown away, until the agency comes up with the next brilliant idea.

SEO is more than a one-off project to tick off on the to-do list. It is a foundation or a philosophy in which all online activities are carried out.  Campaigns should revolve around a “SEO’d platform” that can leverage efforts and results of previous implemented tasks.

During such times as a recession, SEO is a reliable and low cost way of generating qualified traffic to any website.  All it takes is a committment to see the strategy through.

So, how many links is enough?  There is no magic answer here, but I do recommend that website owners should seek at least one backlink per day.  Soon enough, your online presence will be a force to be recokoned with.