5 SEO Tricks For Your Company’s Blog

I see several blog mistakes everyday from corporate blogs that are not only hurting their search engine rankings, but in other cases making them obsolete. Here are 5 quick tips that can greatly improve your SEO without much effort.

External Blogs: The biggest mistake your company can make is having an “external” blog. The entire idea behind having a corporate blog is to get attention by bringing people to your company to sell your products or services. Why then would you want to bring people to an external site? (company.blogger.com, company.wordpress.com, etc.). You are already paying to host your website. By having an internal blog (http://www.company.com/blog), you will substantially improve traffic to your corporate site because people will be directed right to it. It is anathema to bring traffic to your website from a blog that is not on your website. It is incredibly easy to implement your blog from your own site. Just download the CMS (content management system), i.e., Wordpress, Joomla, Typepad, etc., onto your server in a folder (blog, etc.). It is just as easy to host your own blog as it is for them to host it for you. You are already paying for hosting and 95% of the time it will have a database included.

Blog Titles: Make sure that the (title) portion of the blog page has the title of the article contained therein. I cannot express the importance of this enough. Naturally, your main blog page will have a generic title, but your comments page should ALWAYS have the title of the particular article. This could mean the difference between being on page 1 on Google or page 40. The code for the title is already in your template (blog section). Just copy and paste between your (title) tags.

META Tags: META tags are actually not as important as the title, but are still very important. Although Google does not place much importance on them, a number of other search engines do. The META tags need to have relevance to your posting to improve search engine optimization. These tags should not solely be about your company. When I am writing a blog, I create a special field called “tags” and each time I write a new article I include relevant keywords to the article. You simply place the CMS form tag in your HTML (title) tags. Example: (title)some of the company information(tag or PHP code for CMS for tages)(/title).

Email Field: Almost every blog has an Icon to subscribe to RSS feeds. Most people are not going to go through the work of an RSS feed unless they know you, even though it is a minimal amount of work at best. You need to allow them to just put in their email address and press subscribe. Not only is this extremely simple, it goes right into their email each time you have a new post. Due to time constraints, people are much more likely to read your posts in their email versus going to your blog every day. I use Feedburner.com. It is free, and super simple to use. By subscribing to the free service yourself, it will also ping your blog automatically to other media sites.

Plug It: When you write an article/post, take ten minutes to plug it. There are several free sites out there that give you “instant” search engine results. You do not have to wait for Google or Yahoo to get around to crawling your blog. Search engines already have websites they crawl as soon as they are updated. Technorati, Digg, Twitter, Buzzit.com, are just a few of the networks who will get you on Goggle almost instantly. Not only will pinging and submitting your article give you almost instant Google results, it will also help your website’s SEO because you are going to generate a lot more link traffic, which is one of the biggest factors in getting you listed on top.

All five of these changes you should be able to do yourself or pay a web developer professional to achieve for you inexpensively.