When it comes to business blogging, there are differing schools of thought as to the Search Engine Optimisation benefits. I am of the firm opinion that blogging is a fantastic SEO vehicle, as long as trying to improve your search engine rankings isn’t the only motivational factor. Writing blogs simply to stuff them with keywords and not actually providing anything of interest or value to the reader is a counter-productive move which will only reflect poorly on your website and reputation as a whole, and are unlikely to produce many conversions to sales because they won’t inspire the reader to become a customer. Well-written blogs help you to connect with your customers and allow feedback too, if you utilise a comments section.

The best SEO blogs are obviously those which actually have something interesting to say. Common sense it may be, but you’d probably be surprised to see the amount of businesses who seem to blog for blog’s sake rather than actually offering anything insightful or useful. Blogs don’t have to be essays – in fact it is much better that they are short (250-500 words) and sweet rather than overly long and verbose.

Many businesses struggle to come up with subjects to blog about. If you are a company which sells paving slabs, for example, you may wonder what on earth you can write about, but there is always something industry-related happening that you can include in your blog. Building up a selection of tips-and-tricks blogs can be a useful resource for your customers, including things like helpful advice in sourcing the best materials for a particular job, or different methods of laying stones depending on material type and desired result. You can blog about new products or lines that are coming out, any sales, offers or promotions you have running, or your take on latest industry news.

So how do you make your blogs SEO friendly?

By its very nature, regular blogging is SEO friendly in itself. Search engines like websites which constantly add fresh and useful content and index them more frequently than sites which stay the same month after month. I recommend WordPress as the blogging tool of choice for integrating an SEO friendly blog from scratch.

Blogging is a great way to help you target long-tail keywords and attract appropriate traffic to your site. Your homepage is likely to be targeting more general industry terms but you can aim some of your SEO blogs at more specific things by using long tail keywords which means that the visitors they bring are looking for particular products, services or information, which of course you provide them with in the blog and link to appropriate pages elsewhere on your site. A couple of occurrences of your long-tail keyword in a blog post should be enough. Don’t over-egg the pudding by keyword stuffing as this turns readers off in a big way and undermines your overall blogging efforts.

Correctly categorising and tagging your blog posts can have an impact on how effective they are as an SEO tool because the category will dictate the permanent URL of the post and help search engines to see more easily what the blog is about and which search terms would be a good match.

SEO blogging is most effective when the blog posts are useful to humans. You aim to provide useful unique content to readers through your blogs, which is something search engines love. They want to provide the best possible quality sites as search results to their users. Your aims are aligned and your blogs become an effective website optimisation tool to help with your wider SEO campaign.

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