This blog post has been kindly provided by Alex O’Neil of https://fantasoft.co.uk/. Alex runs one of the few honest and friendly social advertising and blog authoring companies around. He is a talented and funny writer, human, and former-child, and already proved to be a fantastic member of our team. He has some things to say.
Blogs! They’re important for your SEO! Many people such as the esteemed Neil Patel rave about the power of blogs, and they aren’t wrong by any stretch! Blogs have successfully been used for years as a way of increasing your power on the internet. Blogs are written to be read and shared by people, which can go a long way to increasing the power your website has in regards to being found on search engines.
Blogs can also help your customers get to know your business. This can be important because many customers like to see the human face of a company. I try to have a little humour in my blogs, even though it seems less professional, because it allows people to see I’m a human being and not a machine. Your blogs should be tailored to your company and be the face of the company you want your customers to see.
Google and Blogs
Google rewards new and fresh content. People who blog about their businesses and their relationships with customers will generally find that they get more traffic than people who don’t. People find blogs interesting, and can share them. On my site: https://fantasoft.co.uk/ I use a tool called: Add this. If people like my blogs, they can easily share them out to Social Media, such as Facebook and Twitter increasing traffic to my site! One thing to note about Google is that the engine hates duplicated or re-blogged content, so all your content should be fresh, new and interesting. Purpose built, rather than copy-pasted.
How much should I write?
Yoast is a fantastic tool for blogging. It automatically scores you for your reading ease, use of subheadings, making sure your paragraphs aren’t too large and it checks your sentences. It looks for weather you’re using more than 20 words in a sentence. It looks for transition words, and passive voice to ensure your blog is snappy and active. Yoast recommends that a blog has at least 300 words. When it comes to word-count the bigger your blog, the more powerful it becomes. Jay Wessman recommended using at least 500. These days I would recommend at least 1000.
You might be thinking: Why so many? First off, 1000 words isn’t that hard to write. Yes, it takes a while, and you may find yourself struggling for content, but a larger blog has more information, more keywords, and will generally fare better on Google and other search engines due to having vastly more content than a smaller blog.
Keywords
Keywords are important for bloggers. They enable people to find your content. Many people, myself included started off by spamming keywords. We wrote them as often as possible, but eventually realised two things: 1: Having an overabundance of keywords makes the blog feel spammy and unreadable, vastly reducing the chances of people sharing it. 2: Google and other search engines will penalise you for spam. One of the other benefits of Yoast is it allows you to make a note of your keywords so that you aren’t spamming. They recommend around 1.5% of your words are keywords.
If you want to write a blog about spam for example, this is a great way to do it. By mentioning the chosen keyword, and then constructing a sentence around it, maybe adding another about it but not mentioning it, we can keep things nice and dynamic. By not mentioning spam too much, but talking about it naturally, we create a blog that is easy to read and doesn’t suffer from a bloated overabundance of keywords.
If you want to write a spammy blog about spam, here’s how not to spam it. You see when you talk about spam for spam’s sake because spam is all that matters you end up dealing with way too much spam and Google can tell you’re spamming your spam blog, and don’t forget that when you spam your spam it’ll kill your blog about spam’s chance to survive and rank. For more information about spam you can type spam into Google!
What should I blog about?
At the end of the day your blogs should reflect your company, the work you do, and potentially even the work you do for others. It’s always good to talk about working with others because keywords will naturally affiliate you with them online. Say for example someone searches for one of your clients. They may well come across your blog, or your blog may start to even rank for the client’s name.
This blog for example is a blog written for someone else. It’s going up on a website that isn’t mine, but the blog will still benefit me. It benefits the owner of the website as well as me though, so it’s all good! There are a lot of people who blog in this way for other companies, as the back links are really beneficial to boosting your website’s online power. You can actually benefit more by having someone else host your blog than you! It’s never a waste of time writing a blog for a friend’s website!
If you own a garage, you can blog about how to clean your car, new motor laws, how to check your tyres’ tread depth and many other things. An accountant can blog about different ways to save money on tax, promoting their skills as well as helping people. If you are a marketing guy, you can write a blog about blogging for one of your friend’s websites to give you a handy back link because you want to feed off the back link potential power of their domain! No matter what business you are in, you can make use of a blog, describing the things you do, the affiliations you make and the services you provide.
Who am I?
I am Alex O’Neil of https://fantasoft.co.uk/. My company is designed around Facebook advertising for customers and helping their websites thrive with onsite and off-site SEO. I have worked for many different industries, From healthcare, to digital marketing, from developing computer games, and writing music for films to acting in them. My website is supported and hosted by: http://frag.co.uk/ and I’m very grateful to Dug for the immense support he has shown me!
image courtesy of Alpha Stock Images – http://alphastockimages.com/