If you are a small business, you should consider setting up a business blog that reaches out to your target audience and accomplishes many things. A blog is a web journal or diary that lists down several pieces of valuable information. It should be updated regularly so that your readers know the latest developments. This article lists down some best practices to follow while setting up a blog. Every blog needs a website name; you can purchase it from several domain providers.
- Setting up a blog is easy and takes very less time
- Your blog name should reflect your business’ identity.
Keywords
After you have purchased hosting space, the next step is forming a list of keywords. These are words and phrases that attract your readers. Your business blog is discoverable only because of these keywords. There are several free and paid tools for keyword discovery. These ‘hooks’ should be used strategically in your blog posts. A good keyword has several characteristics. First, it should be relevant to your business. In the past, some blog owners used to stuff bad or irrelevant keywords for ranking.
Identifying the right keywords and deploying them in your blog is not easy: takes a lot of time and effort. The search engines take time to crawl new blog posts and rank them. Many content creators fail here. However, you can short circuit the entire process by engaging professional blogger outreach companies such as Clickintelligence.co that will contact established bloggers and influencers for spreading your brand message. Many small businesses avail of these programs at affordable costs to achieve their objectives.
Meta Description
A meta description is a set of words and sentences that describe your blog. It would be best if you put up a concise and keyword-rich meta description for your blog post. But what is the importance of this description? When a reader puts up a query on the website, that query fetches several results depending upon the relevance. These results contain the keywords that should satisfy that query. If your blog post meta-descriptor includes the right keywords, the former can be displayed right on the first page.
Meta descriptions affect the rankings of blog posts indirectly. With the right keywords, a descriptor can encourage a reader to click the relevant blog spot. More the click-throughs there are the higher the click-through rate, and the better will be your blog ranking. Don’t stuff irrelevant keywords into your descriptor. You might get an initial surge in traffic, but most of it will be gone forever because the readers were expecting something else. Besides, Google will penalize your site too, and that will hurt your business.
Editorial Calendar and Link Building
While writing blog posts for your business, be sure to link internally and externally. Internal links connect one post to another. External links connect your blog post to higher authority websites. Internal links can fetch you more traffic, while the external ones lend your more authority over a period. Very importantly, blog owners should also have an editorial calendar. This means all your content should be planned and centered around your business activities. By doing this, your online and offline activities will move in tandem.