Companies of all kinds use blogs to engage users, gain site traffic, and establish their reputation. Each new blog post is a new page where users can land and learn something new. Blogs are also a great way to improve your keyword rankings.

If you’re starting a business, blogs are your key to setting yourself apart with personality. Blogs also allow you to explain your product or service in more detail than your main site would. If you have momentum already, blogs can both keep it up and ramp it up.

Link building, the accumulation of reputable links back to your site, goes hand in hand with blogging. As two vital SEO strategies, blogs and link building mutually benefit each other: people who enjoy your original posts may link to them, and you can earn other backlinks by blogging on others’ sites. The two strategies go together like bread and butter. And because strapping buttered bread to a cat causes it to eternally spin in mid-air, due to the former always landing buttered-side down and the latter always landing on its feet… you can visualize something similar occurring when good blogs and good link building combine into a cycle of success. Ideally, you’d want to make your company as popular on the internet as cats.

No promises about that last part, but nevertheless: blogging makes SEO both easier and more enjoyable. Search engines reward your site for consistently putting out new content –“consistently” being at least once a month, preferably more. It may depend on demand.

The research process for blogs can give you up-to-date information on the industry and valuable community ties, including backlink vendors. To stay relevant, we recommend a healthy combination of planning ahead and going with the flow of current events. So, this is a blog post about how to make blog posts… call it postmodern, if you’d like.

Tips on Blog Writing

When choosing a topic, you ought to consider your platform, audience, and objective. Writing for your own site requires keywords and at least one link to another page on your site. When writing for other entities’ platforms, though, you can leave the keyword research and backlinks to them. Want to know why you’ll want to write content for other sites, and always need at least one self-referential link? A self-referential link of ours, to our post on Link Building, can explain why.

Audience creation always relies on crafting personas from demographic information. However, blogging requires you to narrow it down to the portion most receptive of your post’s objective. You’ll create this objective based on the audience you have already created. Once you have that in mind, tailor the post’s content to their interests and needs. And be sure to accompany the content with relevant images –they draw attention to both themselves and the words.

It makes for a nice break in the reading, as you can see.

As for the content itself? We advise a minimum of 500 words, and Buffer’s post on ideal content length identifies an ideal of 1,000-1,600 words. This length registers well in search engines and keeps audience attention within its 7-minute reading time.

All of your links, especially self-referential ones, should have hyperlink text that clearly describes the linked page’s purpose. As hyperlink text, the vague “click here!” works better for the “Never Gonna Give You Up” music video than it will for your site.

The success of blog posts relies heavily on keyword research. Your focus keyword should relate to the specific topic, and 3-5 supporting keywords can relate to your company generally. Remember that keyword-stuffing doesn’t work on search engines anymore, and cynical readers will notice if you call your business the keywordiest keyword in all of Keyword, Florida Keys. You only need the focus keyword in the title, first sentence, alt text, meta description, URL, and one header. You only need to use the 3-5 others once as you see fit.

How to Get More Value from Blog Posts

Sharing blog posts on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram helps the post’s performance, for starters.

Google Analytics provides campaign tracking tools that you should use before posting to any of these. Using the Urchin Tracking Module (UTM), these add data parameters to URLs –typically specifying the platform from whence users came. The URL might have “utm_source=facebook” at the end, for instance. This makes the data less Kafkaesque to segment and interpret when you evaluate your performance in Google Analytics. You can easily gauge your post’s performance on different platforms after you’ve shared these custom URLs on each.

As mentioned earlier, new audiences can hear about you through the grapevine if you grow that vine into other sites’ backyards. Reaching out to other sites can earn you backlinks just as sharing your own posts on social media can. As an added bonus, this establishes your local reputation to complement the personality that blogs provide to your company.

Shed some light upon your site, and make the most of every post.