Are you a home business blogger? Are you creating and publishing content to help build your brand, and perhaps directly or indirectly promote your opportunity or products?
You can create great content, and write really cool articles, but if nobody notices you or finds your blog, it doesn’t really help you much. Obviously. 🙂
Traditionally, one way to get found is to publish lots of keyword rich content, then build backlinks to that content, and wait for search engines to find your content and rank it high enough for searchers to find. This used to work really well, and still does actually, but the rules have changed.
With advancing search technology, the search leader (Google) is striving to provide the best possible results when consumers perform searches for whatever interests them. As home business bloggers, we must understand this and strive to do whatever it takes to increase our chances for showing up when people are searching for what we offer.
I’ve put together a few ways to improve your chances of having success with your blogging efforts.
1) Whatever your niche (network marketing, MLM, direct sales, or some other home business), think long term. There are many tools and tricks out there to help you get short term boosts in search engine ranking, but ultimately this becomes a cat and mouse game with the search engines and isn’t worth it for long term stability.
2) Focus your blog on providing value to your niche. You can certainly monetize and offer products/services/opportunities, but put a tremendous focus on creating content that addresses questions and solves problems for the people you want to attract. Be discreet with the ads – don’t make the mistake of plastering these all over your blog to the point that they distract from your message.
3) Social signals are becoming an important ranking factor. Set up plugins and tools that syndicate your content to Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networks that you are involved in. Join a blog commenting group to help your content get more exposure and “social proof”. Help other bloggers promote their content, and many will help you in return.
4) Use keywords that you’re trying to rank for in your content, but be careful not to over optimize. Excessive bolding, italicizing, and repetition of keywords in your articles and posts is less likely to help now and more likely to hurt.
5) I see people coming out constantly with new tools and approaches for getting links to your content and thus increasing rank for your primary keywords. Beware of any recommendation that promises quick ranking with little effort. Remember – think long term. Winning the search engine wars is the result of slow steady progress. There will be new quick fixes developed constantly, but their effectiveness is likely to be short term at best.
6) Look for opportunities to write content for other blogs. Become a guest blogger. Having content published on other quality sites in your niche,with a link back to your blog, dramatically improves your chances of being found.
It is important, in 2012 and beyond, to focus more on long-term results from your blogging efforts. In the past, quick fixes and SEO tricks made it pretty easy to get ranked if you had time and money to invest in tools and learning how to use them. As search technology improves, and Google continues to tweak their algorithm to filter out web spam, the focus for serious bloggers must be on quality content and long-term vision for solving problems and creating solutions for their visitors and followers.
Did you get some value from this post? If you did, I would really appreciate you sharing it with others! And, your comments are welcome below!
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About Eldon Beard
This is very informative! keywords are very important in Blogging. Since it is how people look on the search engine. Helpful tips Eldon Beard!