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SEO Strategies for Your Business Blog
Everybody wants search engines to send them free traffic but very few know how to attract traffic to a business blog. It's easy if you know how. While many of the things I'll show you are from search engine optimization (SEO), they also improve your site usability. Here are several good SEO strategies to bring traffic to your business blog:
- Place meta-robots to noindex on Archive pages. You want visitors to come in on content and reduce the number of non-content pages index. This means all menu pages and archive lists (including monthly) with duplicate content. (This includes errordocs.)
- Remove unnecessary links of low value. Keep contextual links that enhance the content readers see, but remove "permalink" and other meaningless cross references. Readers can find the article clicking on its title, or list reference.
- Return something useful for every request. Have a proper 404 page that provides people instructions to find what they seek. If a page is broken, provide an error plus guidance for the reader.
- Use rel=nofollow on links to secondary value pages. Any page that is primarily static and not a key inbound page because of its nature (i.e. contact page, privacy statement), should not be followed. This goes for much of your navigation, especially to pages that won't be indexed.
- Build a target keyword library prior to site design. Look for 3 to 4 word phrases that have contextual value. Use them to develop content, title pages, link between related content, and build tag clouds on archive pages.
- Use your 'robots.txt' to keep spiders from indexing low value pages. This focuses their efforts on higher value pages, just be careful about recursive properties of the 'Disallow' statement.
- Write for a specific reader, rather than a general category. Focus on a single buyer of your product or service, rather than talking about your product or service. Focus on what they are interested in hearing about instead of flogging yourself. Use their language.
- Use keywords in the naming of pictures as long as it describes the picture. One day search engines will learn how to look at pictures, so make sure everything said about the picture matches what is in it. This means picture naming will be relevant to alt tag usage.
- Reserve some content for guest blogging and article marketing. Create quality links back to your site from popular sources already discussing your topic area. Exchange with these sources with guest articles of theirs on your site.
Stay away from link back schemes that don't provide extra value to the readers of another publication. Stay away from short term bursts like talking up your site on social networking sites. The key is to build up an audience, with an audience the search engines will find you.
Top rankings mean nothing if your business blog is not attracting and keeping profitable customers. Any SEO company can get you traffic, but traffic has no value if it produces no sales.
Now I will admit, I still have room on some of my sites to implement more of these SEO insights.
If you are managing multiple properties then work through one items at a time through as many sites as you can. You may also discover rolling in these changes over time creates better results than doing them all at once.
That's why monthly maintenance and webmaster packages are so popular. Even if you aren't doing the work in-house, you can introduce these improvements each month without spending a fortune.
It's okay to do a little when you can each week, but don't procrastinate, valuable buyers right now may not be able to find you in the search engines.
There you have it, some of my very best blogging SEO insights you can use for your business blog. With these insights you can magnetically attract new visitors from search engines, you don't need gimmicks, just lots of value.
© 2009 B2B Website Profits, All rights reserved.
Justin Hitt helps business websites and portals attract huge volumes of traffic to turn into profits. For your business website visit http://HittPublishingDirect.com/
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