Robots and Humans: Five SEO Blog Elements to Please Both Audiences

Small business owners are continually looking for ways to cut costs and maximize profits. If you’re spending a huge chunk of your marketing budget on traditional advertising such as print ads, media spots and mailers, you may want to consider blogging as a very cost-effective way of increasing business. After the costs of hosting fees and a designer to set up your blog, you’ll not only have a “free” (your time has a value) marketing method for your business, but could also generate extra money in your budget in the form of savings.

Frequent quality blogging will increase your search engine rankings so that potential customers can find you easily, and it also may be leveraged to establish you as an expert in your field. To achieve high rankings and leave readers with a great impression of your business, every blog post should include SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategies targeted toward both your human audience (those who actually BUY from you) and the search engine indexing robots.

The following five SEO elements are essential.

Title Tags

Title tags are used to title each page of your site content and what your potential clients see on the search engine results page (SERP). Robots take notice of them as well as they serve to initially tell the robot what the page of content is about. If you do not place well-researched keywords in the title tag, your blog post is not likely to rank anywhere in the first few pages of the SERP, which means that potential clients may never find it at all. If a reader does happen to weed through several pages of results to find your blog post, he or she is likely to skip over it if the title does not contain keywords that appropriately describe the content of the blog post.

Quick Tip: Best practices are to shoot for less than 70 characters and be very clear as to page relevancy. Optimally, use your primary keyword – secondary keyword | Brand Name (along those lines).

Meta Descriptions

Like title tags, meta descriptions appear on search engine results pages. These are the snippets of concise information about the website displayed under the title, and they should be written with people in mind. Google does not use keywords in meta descriptions to rank websites, so this element is strictly used to attract the attention of humans so that they will click on your site once the robots have done their job. Regardless if you are doing the work, you should include keywords as things tend to change and Google is not the only Search Engine on the planet ;)

Quick Tip: Roughly 150 characters and develop to engage a reader.

Headers

One of the primary tasks of search engine indexing robots is to discover keywords on your website to help determine your ranking among similar websites, and they take notice of keywords in coded headers faster than those in the body text. SEO-friendly blogs typically code the title as an H1 header, and it may be identical to the one in the title tag or slightly different. Breaking up your content with keyword-rich subheadings, which are typically coded as H2 headers, not only helps with SEO but also makes scanning the content easier on the reader. Your header is also most likely the first thing a reader will see when they land on your page.

Quick Tip: Be concise and leverage keywords in-line with your Title

Engaging Content

When writing a blog post, judicious (but not “overkill”) use of your keyword phrase is essential. Google’s robots will ignore you entirely if you overuse the same keywords, and readers will likely do the same if faced with awkward writing. Many SEO experts will tell you not to use your keyword phrase more than four to six times in a blog post of 350 to 500 words, but in some cases, even that may be too much. Rather than aiming for a specific keyword density, focus on writing engaging blog posts that make people want to keep reading. Use the keyword phrase a few times in such a way that it naturally flows with your content.

Quick Tip: Don’t discount using synonyms and in-indusrty terms in the copy that support your primary keywords. Google often will reward you as it will “know” these words “belong” together in context.

Backlinks

Google’s indexing algorithms place a high value on how popular a website is, and one indication of popularity is how often a site is linked to from another quality site. Blogging is one of the easiest ways to create backlinks to a company’s main website and help increase search engine rankings. Every blog post presents an opportunity to link to the main page of your business website, at least one of the services pages and the page containing your contact information. This does not mean every time you make a link it will be another “point” in your favor but it is a good item to leverage if it provides value to the end users experience. The concept of back-links is that they should serve the reader first as they assist them down a path to information they find useful or actionable.

Quick Tip: If building back-links from sites other than yours, align with quality sites and NEVER BUY links. Remember – it’s all about what would help the reader.

Benefits of Blogging for Small Businesses

Writing for both your human and non-human audiences can dramatically increase traffic to your website and help your business grow. Google views blogs as a form of news and therefore may index new blog posts faster than it does regular web pages. If you blog at least once weekly and utilize the right SEO strategies, including placing well-researched keywords in the appropriate places with engaging content, Google’s indexing algorithms will quickly brand you as an expert worthy of high rankings.

Likewise, if you hook the human reader with meaningful posts designed to educate, inspire or entertain, you’re more likely to gain a large following of loyal customers, which is the ultimate goal of any small business owner.