If you’re a small business owner who’s hoping to use a blog platform to host your company website, you’re making a good decision. In decades past, websites cost thousands to have custom created, and you had to rely on your tech guys to update content and add new articles to your website for you.
Getting your own company blog is both simple and affordable, involving just a few easy steps that you can easily manage yourself if you like. You can purchase a domain name and hosting package, activate WordPress (or AKZIS), and start setting up your basic company pages in a matter of an hour or two.
However, once you’ve set up all the key pages of your company blog, there’s the important matter of search engine optimization. The whole point of having a website (blog) is to be found.
If people already know your name, great. Adding your company name and a short description to the title page of your blog is the first step to getting your site indexed on the web and found by people who are looking for you by name.
However, there is also the matter of being discovered by people who have no idea what your name is. These are the web searchers who are online hunting for what you do, NOT who you are. They likely don’t know you from a hole in the wall– but they do know that they need a specific service, or they need help with a problem, or they want a product that you have, or they desire something else that you offer.
So, if you intend to be found for more than just your name, but for the actual items that your target customer wants online – then do a really good job of adding keywords to your blog in all the right places.
Again, just like having a website created from scratch, search engine optimization was once a complex process that involved not only researching the right keywords and phrases but tucking them into all the little hiding places in your website’s code where keywords might live.
But now, the great news is that you can get at least some basic understanding of keywords, for a do-it-yourself search engine optimization job that you can likely complete in a single afternoon.
Here are the basic steps:
Find a trusted and helpful keyword research tool such as the one offered with Google Keywords program. You can try theirs if you’ve signed up with them… or, head to the search engines and type in “keyword research tool” which will pull up a list of ones to try.
Look up your keyword phrases by typing in some commonly searched terms to see what comes up. This can take some experimenting. You don’t want to be too broad with your keyword selections. The broader the term, the more sites you’ll be competing with — and you’re less likely to be found.
But on the other hand, you don’t want your keywords to be so obscure that very few searchers are ever actually typing them in. We’re looking for common terms and phrases used in your industry.
Once you’ve selected a few different keyword phrases that you want to target in your blog, make sure to add them to the following areas:
- The blog's title and description
- Any static pages that you create - in the title of each page
- Your post titles
- Any H1, H2, and H3 headlines that you add to individual pages and posts
- In the first paragraph of your blog articles
- In the categories and tags of your blog
You should also add your keywords and keyword phrases to links that you publish throughout the text of your blog pages and posts.
Another good trick to do with keywords is to use keyword links when linking from someone else’s blog or social media profile to your own blog. This is also possible if you run multiple blogs or websites. The keyword link “points” to your blog using those specific phrases, which makes it more likely that you’ll be found for that phrase.
