Updated October 19, 2019. Ask about our Pay-Per-Lead SEO program by calling or clicking the link above.
ORANGE COUNTY, CA – It’s our normal SEO practice to build a custom WordPress blog for our new clients and continually post on these blogs. However, recently we’ve come across new clients who are reluctant to have a blog hosted on their site. We tell these clients not to waste their time and money on SEO, and there are many reasons why blogs are vital to optimal SEO.
Let’s start with the basics of why search engines were built: because text existed on the Internet in an unorganized fashion. Search engine spiders indexed, organized and provided the text in an easy-to-use format for their users. Google rates and ranks sites based on three important factors: content, relevancy and popularity.
We have said before that content is king when it comes to SEO. After all, Google feeds and survives on content. Google also loves sites that feed it more quality content on a regular basis. As we explained before, a WordPress blog is the best platform for SEO.
Graphic Courtesy of Dpk-GraphicDesign.com
If you are competing with strong rivals, you can have an advantage over them by simply writing and posting articles on your site’s blog on a regular basis. “Regular basis” is a loose term – for some smaller businesses, writing once a month gives you that advantage. But the reality is that for most e-commerce sites, writing once a day may still not be enough. So, depending on your market, you need to decide how often you want to write.
No matter how often you post, always remember the most important factor for more SEO success: stick to your strategy and continue at it for at least six months to see the results. In the meantime, here are some of the most common areas of a blog that I am asked to explain to my clients.
Why Can’t I Use My Off-Site Blog?
You may have a blog that is hosted on blogger: example.blogger.com. Whatever you write and post on this blog will not affect your main site: www.example.com. Remember, your goal should be to show Google that www.example.com is being updated on a regular basis. Thus, your blog needs to be hosted on your site: www.example.com/blog/.
Why Do I Need A WordPress Blog?
There are many blog templates you can integrate with your site, but through our research and experience we have concluded that WordPress is the best for this purpose. Here are some reasons:
WordPress Easily Allows for Skin Changes
You can conveniently design and tweak the look of your blog with WordPress. You do need to know web-development to do so, but they provide you with all the tools you need. So, your blog will look like a page of your site.
Because WordPress is the most popular blog CMS, it has many users and many web developers behind it. Thus, you have a huge pool of free WordPress templates to use, as well as lots of plugins. Also, any time you get stuck on something, you can use the many forums on the topic to ask your question. It is also very likely that your question has already been answered by an expert, just look for your topic and search.
WordPress Allows for Permalinks
Permalinks are a great relevancy tool we use to optimize our clients’ sites. Keyword-rich permalinks help your page rank well for your intended keywords. WordPress allows you to easily edit your page’s URL using permalinks.
WordPress Allows for Meta Tag Optimization
This is also important. You can write a separate title, description and keywords tags for each of your blog posts.
Google Loves WordPress “Tags”
You can give each post specific “tags” that are basically keywords related to the post (not to be confused with meta tags, which are part of the header code). WordPress creates a specific page for each tag and will group all the posts that have the same tags under it. The URL of this page also includes the tag: millionairium.com/tag/google-seo.
Tag pages rank very well on Google search results because all the content under the tag page are related to the tag keyword.
Using the Blog Feed on Other Pages
Your WordPress Blog Feed could be used on any page of your site. That will help to freshen up your other site pages content since you’re updating your blog content on a regular basis.
Google Indexes WordPress Posts Immediately
When you post on your WordPress blog, Google is pinged and will immediately index your new post and place it in the search results. This eliminates the need for you to have to “submit” your new page to Google or “link” to it from other sites or just simply have to wait for Google to see the new post.
In general, Google loves WordPress sites and will rank sites with such blogs that are updated on a more regular basis better than the competition. If you have any questions, please leave a comment here or contact us directly.