By Mark Gleason - Web Developer at Xapsis Integrated Marketing
Blogs rank really well in the search engines, specifically Google. Every time a blog is posted it pings out to all the search engines and they instantly read it, unlike a webpage that can take days, weeks or even months to cache, depending on the website's popularity. One key benefit of this instant caching is for activity that you want to tell people about today.
Think Search Engine Optimization, otherwise known as SEO, when writing your blog posts. Always think about key phrases to try and stack your posts with them. Google will place more emphasis on the title and the first 100 words, so make sure you think about these carefully.
Blogging is also powerful from an SEO standpoint. Strategic and active blogging can help you:
- Gain more views for your site
- Penetrate more keywords
- Attract links – provided you're promoting your content
- Add social media sites to the mix
Keywords are the foundation for your SEO efforts. Most bloggers understand this and often include keywords and keyword variations in their copy. But where many authors drop the ball is by not varying the title of the blog post and the title tag element.
Often, this is due to inexperience or time constraints, such as the CMS or publishing platform duplicating the post title and the title tag with copy and paste.
Will this negatively impact SEO? No. But given the fact that the title tag is still the most important piece of content on your site (from an SEO perspective), not varying title and title tag is really more of a missed opportunity.
