There are a lot of complicated, behind the scenes stuff that goes on when trying to rank well with Google. There are things you can tinker with, exact keywords you can target, campaigns you can start, code you can implement, and more behind the scenes work that can get you to rank higher on Google. But all of that is changed the way it is and valued by Google for one reason: because they are trying to rank the highest quality websites first. At the end of the day, you can let us worry about the behind the scenes stuff, but one of the first and most important steps to take is to make sure that your website has good, quality content. And that is more than just a couple of pages about what you do and about your company.

That is a part of it, of course. All of it plays a role, and any original content is important. Having pictures can be good, as well as having unique code for tools, calculators, form submission boxes and other custom features help out with your ranking. But if you have quality content, you are going to be well off.

What is Quality Content?

Quality content is anything that informs people about either what you do, or what they need from you. And what quality content should you write about? Anything that a lot of people search for is great, but if you run a business, you probably already know what people are calling you about. And it is those questions that your blog posts should answer. You can also post your blog posts and articles to letter to the editors and guest writing spots online, which is a great opportunity for cross-promotion.

At the end of the day, what you do, what you know, and what your customers want and need are what you should write about. It may seem like a good idea to try to tackle advanced problems, and that in-depth content can be helpful. But what the best thing for you to write about, is the things that you already know. When you go outside of your field of expertise, that is when you start giving bad advice, and leading customers astray.

Originality & Consistency

As well, Google punishes those who copy content from other places. If you know about something, you can write all original thoughts and tips out without having to paraphrase from other places. The more you know, the better and more original your advice can be. As well, by writing what you know, you can show that you have an in-depth understanding of what companies need from your business.

It is important to be consistent with your posting. Pictures or infographics can be nice to break up the all text posts. Target keywords or areas of your business that you foresee as profit centers, but also post about things that may be barriers of entry to them using your business. When you help them solve those problems, that can free them up to support you.

A business that adds new content to its blog at least semi-frequently will often receive much more website traffic than those with no blog (or an outdated, unmaintained blog). In addition to receiving more traffic, a few other benefits of blogging include: building your brand presence & awareness, demonstrating expertise & building credibility, generating new leads for your business, and much more.

The more you blog, the more Google and the other search engine spiders will visit and crawl your site. Each piece of content likely covers more phrases that your site may rank for, which can help increase your presence in the search engine results pages (SERPs). If you write high-quality content, you may inspire other websites to link to you. This can lead to more traffic from the linking site (which could turn into more leads and/or sales), and can help build your site’s authority which can lead to higher rankings and more organic traffic.

Any blogging is better than no blogging, but most blogs can stand to use some optimization to help improve their chances of being found in the search engines. Fortunately these tweaks are often simple to implement, especially if you use WordPress for your blogging platform (which we highly recommend). Other CMS platforms are relatively simple to optimize with the right plugins.

Today we’ll take a look at 3 useful tweaks you can make to your blog today to better optimize it. Soon we’ll take a look at several more blog optimization tips.

1. Utilize Categories

Proper usage of categories for your blog posts can make a huge difference for both spiders and readers. Using categories creates organized content themes across your site and keeps relevant content clustered, which makes it easier for users to navigate and can often help with search engine rankings.

Decide on about 5-10 categories that your site will use. Try not to create anymore unless you absolutely need them (or you have a very large site). When you post a new article, only choose one category in order to prevent the post from showing up on multiple sections of your site (duplicate content doesn’t help SEO!).

2. Utilize Pagination

Many people make the mistake of having all of their blog posts on a single never-ending page. This is a bad approach for a number of reasons, especially because it can hurt load times. Long load times are bad for user experience. It also helps keep your content organized and allows for archiving by months, which is beneficial for readers and search engines.

Be careful if you have a free WordPress blog theme, as many of these are notorious for having all archived content on one page. If that’s the case, be sure to search the WordPress plugin repository for “pagination” and you’ll find a number of great free plugins to choose from. We’d recommend one, but in a few months a better one might be out, the one we recommend could break, etc., so just be sure to look at recent reviews and choose a highly-rated option.

3. Add Related Posts

A great, and often underutilized way to organize your blog content is by showing related posts at the bottom of your current blog post. There are a number of plugins that can automatically choose a few blogs that are similar to the current post and add them in with no extra work on your part. This ensures that older blog posts don’t get lost over time and lose their power, plus it helps create a flow of backlinks with similar content–which passes useful link juice around your site.

If your blog doesn’t automatically show a “Next” and “Previous” post link at the bottom of your posts, consider installing a plugin that will add it in as well. This can help boost engagement and increase a reader’s time on your site, which is a metric Google uses to determine how helpful your content is. The more helpful, the better you’ll rank.

If you’ll go and make these few small tweaks to your site, your blog (and whole website) will be much better off! It’s well worth the effort. If you need any assistance, give tekRESCUE a call, we’d love to help optimize your site!