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Why are you writing a blog in the first place?

Are you hoping to drive traffic to your website? Are you trying to establish yourself as an expert in the field?  Maybe you want to generate discussion on social media. No matter why you are writing, one critical question is “How Long Does My Blog Have to Be?” Not too long ago, just about any SEO expert would have given you the same answer: around 500 words. Today, the answer may be more nuanced. You could probably cover some topics in less than 300 words, while others may need 3,000 words.

The short answer to this question is, it depends. Your blog posts should have enough content to cover your topic but be readable enough to keep your audience coming back for more.

Longer Posts or More Posts?

The word count for your blog affects your publishing schedule. If you write shorter posts, publish more frequently.  In any case, don’t overdo it. This will only lead to you getting burnt out and your readers getting overwhelmed.

Three Best Practice Guidelines

Are you ready to get started?  Here are three main considerations:

1. What Works for Your Topic?
   If your blog focuses on in-depth analysis and journalistic style writing, you’ll probably be writing longer posts.  If you prefer topics like “Strange Things I Saw on the Way to Work,” you’ll probably be better off with short posts.

2. What Works for Your Audience?
   Who are your readers?  Why are they reading your blog? No matter what the topic is, every good blogger writes for their audience. Write what works for them, and you are more likely to succeed. If you already have many readers, you may consider a reader survey. If you’re not there yet, check out your analytics to see which posts are more popular and get the most comments or shares.

3. What Works for You?
   What kind of writer are you?  Is your style more concise or wordier? If you’ve been struggling to write long posts, maybe you should try your hand at shorter content. If you feel you’re leaving too much left unsaid, why not see how a longer post works?

The best thing about blogging is that you have the freedom to do what you want to do. If you want to write 10,000-word blog posts, you can. If you’d rather post a picture of a kitten with a clever caption, you can. The content you create is completely up to you. Look around and see what other people are doing. Look at your numbers and see what your audience is responding to. In the end, go with what works.

Want more tips and insights from Cuppa SEO?

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So how do you optimize your blog for better SEO? Here are five simple things you can do.

1. Title Tags

When a page is displayed on the Google search results page, the title tag is the link that you click on to view the content. You can specify the title tag on your blog using the SEO Yoast plugin (this sounds more geeky than it actually is) and simply typing it in.

Ideally, it should be short and punchy (Google only displays the first 60-70 characters or so), and convey some meaningful information about the blog post the user is about to read. And it should include your most relevant SEO keyword. Google gives title tags significantly more weight than the regular body of your blog when it comes to SEO, so it’s a great opportunity for keyword optimization.

2. Meta Descriptions

The meta description is the short blurb directly underneath the title tag in a Google search result. Google allows for about 156 characters for meta descriptions when viewed on a desktop, and about 120 characters when viewed on a mobile device. This means you can go into slightly more depth about what the reader can expect from your blog post – a sentence or two, tops.

Years ago, Google stated that meta descriptions are no longer part of their SEO equation. But if you break any of Google’s rules, like making your meta description too long, you can get dinged for it! So it IS still part of the SEO equation, but not in the way it used to be.

That said, don’t discount their power. They still have value to the human eye, so make sure they’re informative and well written. And it’s TOTALLY OK to use keywords in them.

While your title tag is focused on your main keyword, your meta description should use couple of important related keywords, based on things you cover in the post. For instance, if your title tag is, “Tips to Get the Most out of Your Blog’s SEO,” then your meta description might be, “Using title tags, meta descriptions, and more, to improve your blog’s search optimization.”

3. Headlines

While title tags and meta descriptions appear on the Google search page, the headline is the first thing you read when you actually visit the page. There are also subheadings: smaller headlines that break the blog down into sections. Google’s search algorithms take both headlines and subheadings into consideration when it comes to SEO. Much like title tags, they should be fairly short and punchy, and include a major keyword.

4. Photos

You probably don’t think much about the file names you use when you save images for your blog. But Google does. That name is weighed significantly in SEO, particularly when it comes to Image searches. If it’s just a random string of numbers and letters, you’re throwing away an important opportunity to have that image (and then, hopefully, the rest of your blog) seen by your target audience. Give every photo a file name relevant to what’s in the image, and include an important keyword.

5. Text Links

When your blog hyperlinks to another webpage, the text you use to create that hyperlink is factored into that page’s SEO. So when linking to other blog posts on your site (which you absolutely should do in every post, for a number of reasons) avoid generic statements like, “Click here,” and instead craft a short phrase, three or four words tops, and include a keyword relevant to the post you’re linking to.

These are just a few of the ways you can improve your SEO and maximize your blog’s visibility. What will you do to ensure your audience can find your site easily on Google?

Want more tips and insights from Cuppa SEO?

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Yet somehow, you still haven’t started actually blogging yet. What’s holding you back? There are a number of things that might be doing it. Here are some of the most common blocks that keep brands from blogging regularly, and how you can overcome them.

“How Will I Find the Time?”

Your brand’s marketing department has a thousand other tasks to perform at any given time. The team is stretched thin as it is. How will anyone manage to write and research three or four high quality, engaging blog posts every week on top of their regular duties?

There’s a very simple solution. If you don’t have anyone on staff available with both the time and the writing talent to maintain a good quality blog, you can simply outsource it. By hiring professional writers, your brand can produce high quality content, week after week, that will engage your audience and generate interest, while at the same time freeing your own team up to focus on the myriad other tasks on your plate.

“How Do I Come Up with Topics?”

This is another issue that can turn people off of blogging. They start out strong at first, creating three or four brand new blogs each week, each on a different topic of importance or concern to their audience.

But after a while, their ideas start to run out. Three or four times a week becomes once a week, becomes once or twice a month at most, simply because they don’t know what else to write about. Even if you’re outsourcing your blog, you’ll likely have to come up with many, if not most of the topics, yourself. So how do you keep things fresh, week after week?

Keep your ear to the ground. Search popular news sites for new stories about your industry. Set up Google alerts for the most popular keywords related to your brand, industry, and products, to be notified whenever someone else posts about them. Check LinkedIn and other sites to see what people in your field are talking about at the moment. All of these things are fodder for blog topics. The potential is limitless, if you just know where to look.

“What If Nobody Reads It?”

Maybe you maintained a blog for a while, but you couldn’t get anyone to take notice. With nobody reading it, it didn’t seem worth the time and resources to continue blogging.

Well, just writing the blog isn’t enough. You need to promote it. Post it to social media. Share it with friends and connections in your industry. Develop an e-mail list and send it out as part of your weekly newsletter.

Also remember that building up a following takes time. The readers won’t come overnight. But if you continue blogging consistently, and continue promoting your blog, then people will start to take notice, and you can build up a loyal readership that’s invested in you and your brand.

You can always find plenty of reasons not to blog, if that’s what you’re looking for. But in the end, you have to remember that there are many more reasons TO blog, and a lot of success to be had by creating content for your brand. But the only way to see that success is to get over your aversion and blog, blog, blog!

Want to Jumpstart Your Blogging?
Download Cuppa SEO’s complimentary Blogging 101 ebook for tons of tips and strategies!

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In this installment of the series, we cover an important blogging tip: why your blog needs to be a subpage of your website — not a subdomain.

Check it out to make sure your blog is working to improve engagement AND your overall website authority …

We hope this tip helps you brew a better blog!

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Being an expert in your industry makes it possible to provide relevant solutions to your customers. It also makes it easier to identify trends that can help your customers even further.

And although experience can make you an expert, constant learning is also a key component to your remaining one. Whether it’s from articles, blogs, a mastermind group, trade shows, or some other medium, fresh input is critical to remaining a thought leader in your industry.

What I’ve found, though, is that people who are experts in their industry often feel that they have nothing to write about. They don’t feel like an expert, or they believe nobody would want to read what they have to say.

Although there are many reasons behind these concerns, there’s one thing I’d like to share. To you, what you do every day feels common place — it’s natural to you, so it’s easy to believe everyone has the same information/understanding you do.

This is simply not true. You’ve probably worked for years to become really good at what you do, and what’s “well-worn” knowledge to you is BRAND NEW to the rest of us that don’t do what you do. Sharing this knowledge can be super helpful — and has great value — to your clients.

And that’s what a blog is all about — sharing relevant, useful information with people who need it.

Think about it. You know what your customers’ biggest problems and pain points are. You know exactly how your products and/or services can solve their problems. The only difference is, instead of discussing these pain points and solutions face-to-face with a client, you’ll need to put it into words and write about it on your blog.

So, if you’re thinking “why would anybody want to read what I have to say?” The answer is, it’s the same reason your clients come to you in the first place — because you have something of value to offer.

Remember, things that are common place to you, are NOT common place to your clients! And I don’t know anybody who finds a solution to one of their problems boring or irrelevant, do you?

In my industry, clients want to know more about SEO, user experience (UX), web design, conversion (CV), blogging and social media. Each of these main topics has many, many sub topics that I can focus on in a blog post — giving me hundreds of things to write about.

This is quite possibly the most important of all the blogging tips I share, because a blog cannot exist without content. And it will never engage with readers unless that content is relevant and useful.

Want more blogging tips?
– Blogging 101 Tips: With Inconsistency Comes Weakness
– Blogging 101 Tips: Set Up Your Blog as a Subpage (good) vs. a Subdomain (bad)
– Blogging 101 Tips: Creating a Blogging Campaign

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 appeared first on Cuppa SEO.

The post Cuppa SEO Webinar Series: Blogging 101 appeared first on Cuppa SEO.

Freshness is an important factor in how well your website ranks in natural search results on Google.

But where you add that fresh content to your site is just as important as how rich, relevant and useful it is.

Many novice SEO (search engine optimization) practitioners will tell you that the best way to inject new content into your site is to “freshen up” your homepage and subpages with new copy and keywords — sometimes on a monthly basis.

Taking this approach on a well-optimized, high-ranking site will most likely backfire.

SEO is Like a Phone Number

Let’s take a look at why constantly freshening up your actual web pages is a bad idea. Which leads me the the question …

Would you change your phone number each month?

Of course not. Customers and colleagues are depending on your being on the other end of a specific set of ten digits when they make a call to get in touch. It’s the same with Google, who is counting not just on your URL for a particular page’s location — but also on the content, keywords and imagery (which of course is optimized, right?) that live on each web page.

Like a phone number, Google is depending on you to keep the same definers in place for your web pages. And when you change the information, like changing a phone number, you’re no longer where Google expects you to be. Depending on how much content and keywords are altered, this may mean that you go back to ZERO in Google’s eyes for page authority (which affects where you rank in natural search results).

Where Fresh Content Should Go

Now that you know what not to do, the next question is where do we put our fresh content? Google’s algorithm is looking for it, and so are our visitors, so we can’t just forgo implementing a fresh content strategy.

The answer is actually pretty simple. Fresh content goes on your blog. Now, every time you publish a blog post, Google notices and gives your website credit for having some new, fresh content. If blogging is new to you, check our article, Blogging 101 Tips: Creating a Blog Campaign, to help get you started. You can also sign up for our free Blogging 101 Webinar to learn more about the art of blogging.

The Subpage vs. Subdomain Dilemma

In order for your blog to count as fresh content on your website, it has to be a subpage of your site, not a subdomain. If this doesn’t make sense, check out our bleet on the topic, Blogging 101 Tips: Subpage vs. Subdomain.

Thank you for visiting Cuppa SEO! I hope this clarifies where and how to publish fresh content!

The post The Freshness Factor: The Right Way to Freshen Your Website Content appeared first on Cuppa SEO.

In this installment of our Understanding Online Marketing series, we’ll be taking a closer look at the power of blogging.

If blogging is new to you, here’s a quick definition …

What is a Blog?

In a nutshell, a blog is a place where you publish articles online — specifically, on your website — and it’s a fantastic way to connect with customers, increase traffic to your website and improve your search engine rank.

Blogging is one of the most effective ways to create a buzz with your clients and potential clients — while positioning you as a thought leader in your field, adding credibility to your website, team, products and services.

The Next Natural Step in Online Marketing

Once you have a well-crafted site — with SEO, a solid user experience (UX) and conversion brewed into it — the next natural step in your online marketing timeline is the creation of a blog on your website.

Notice that I said “on your website,” which means that your blog needs to be a subpage of your site, not a subdomain. For more on this, feel free to check out our article Blogging 101 Tips: Set Up Your Blog as a Subpage vs. a Subdomain.

When you start writing a blog, it becomes the source for fresh content on your site, which is very appealing to Google’s Penguin algorithm. In addition to pleasing Google, fresh content is also very appealing to the human eye — which is why a blog is so effective in building relationships with clients.

Blogging needs to precede social media marketing. When you post on social media, you always want to drive traffic to YOUR website, as opposed to someone else’s, and having a fresh blog post each week makes it super-easy to do that.

If you’re wondering why this is important, think of it this way: when you share someone else’s article on social media, it may be helpful but you’re just delivering someone else’s content to your followers. In other words, you’re kind of like the mailman delivering someone else’s letter.

When you share YOUR content that lives on YOUR website, now that traffic comes to you and all of the wonderful products and services you offer can be easily be found by the reader. Of course, all of the other benefits listed above — like being seen as a thought leader — occur, too.

The Content Marketing Model

Blogs have altered the very fabric of the marketing model, moving us away from a selling philosophy (thank goodness) and into an era of content marketing, which is a fancy term for building relationships.

The best way to develop relationships is by offering rich, relevant, benefit-driven and insightful content — while asking for nothing in return.

As you build relationships, your readers will continue to come back to your blog — and they’ll tell their friends or associates about you. Once you’ve become their trusted source for what you do, you’ve gained a customer and a brand advocate.

Sure, an occasional call-to-action in a blog is totally fine, but an outright sales pitch is a sure-fire way to ruin your chances of developing a healthy, long-term relationship with your readers.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Blogging on your website, at least once per week, can also help you get found easier in search engine results. In our blogging experiment last spring, we found that consistently blogging at least once per week can significantly improve your website’s authority (credibility) in Google’s eyes, helping you rank considerably higher in search results that are relevant to what you do.

In Conclusion

There’s so much to discuss about blogging and what we’ve covered merely scratches the surface. But if you’re serious about growing your business, it’s a critical component to success — especially if you have a lot of competition in the marketplace.

Want to learn more about blogging?
Sign up for our Blogging 101 Webinar. It offers many tips and best practices to help you brew a better blog.

For more on online marketing…
You can sign up for our complimentary Holistic Approach to Online Marketing webinar.

You can also check out other articles in this series:
– Understanding Online Marketing, Part 1: Your Website
– Understanding Online Marketing, Part 2: User Experience (UX)
– Understanding Online Marketing, Part 3, Conversion

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