9 SEO tips for small businesses to get your blog noticed

Emma Newbury, content marketing executive at Yoma presents her tips on how to achieve the best SEO results

As any good SEO services provider will tell you, blogging is an important tool when it comes to marketing your business. Not only is it an effective way to communicate with your customers, but it can help with SEO on your main company website when linked to a successful blog.

To create a blog that works and gets lots of people reading it, you need to ensure that people can easily find it. This means doing your search engine marketing research and ensuring you optimise your blog posts for SEO, so that Google and other search engines rank your blog highly.

Here are nine of the best tips for perfecting your blogs for best SEO results:

Original and relevant content

Google values relevant and informative content and originality counts for a lot. If it’s already been written a thousand times before, the likelihood is that a search engine will just pass over your blog. You need fresh ideas and when writing for your blog, try and come at it from a different angle.

Utilise keywords

Keywords are incredibly important for on-page optimisation and taking the time to thoroughly research the best and most relevant keywords for your blog will pay in the long run. Make a list of words that are appropriate for your site. If you are stuck, there are plenty of free tools that can help generate relevant keywords such as Google Adwords Keyword Tool. This tool can even show you what keywords your competitors are using and provide SEO analysis.

Regular content

To optimise your blog, you must add content frequently. Google and other search engines need to know that your site is active and not dead space so creating regular blogs will help with this.

Relevant links

Building links into your blog post is a great way to enhance your SEO and also helps readers to link through to other relevant pages, either internally or externally. If you mention something that is covered on your main company website, make sure you include a link to that page. If you reference another blog or article on your page, include a link.

Optimise your theme

Make sure that your code is clean and that search engines can find it. Ensure there are no broken links or broken navigation menus. The blog site must have a fast loading speed to create a good user experience. Companies that provide SEO services will be able to offer advice about this.

Install a sitemap

This will provide readers (and therefore Google) with a full map of all blog posts, all pages and any archives. This makes it easier for readers to navigate their way around the site and find the most relevant information more easily. It also means that search engines can index your site properly.

Optimise images

We have talked a lot about words but images are also important. If you are including images with your blog posts, you must ensure that you include relevant keywords within the saved file name and always provide alternative text with a relevant description of the photo.

Build up social media profiles

If you are utilising social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn for example) for your business then you must ensure you crosslink them with your blog. Promote your new blog posts across your social media platforms to drive more traffic to your site.

Subscribe option for readers

To really get the most out of your blog SEO, give readers the opportunity to subscribe to your blog by placing a Feed Subscription Button on your page.

Consider SEO services

After implementing all of the above you may want to consider receiving help from an SEO agency to help you with your company blog. An agency can help you utilise  more inbound marketing services to help boost your campaign.