Blog Writing Best Practices for SEO

As an SEO company one of the more frequent questions we get from our clients is how they should be managing and writing their blog. We have decided to publish a Best Practices for Blog Writing post.

1. Unique Quality Content. When it comes to search engines, content is king. They value good quality content and give it much greater consideration in the rankings. Avoid copying and pasting other content that you find on the internet unless you are quoting a publication. If there are some similar points that you want make, it would be best to rewrite the content into your own words.
2. Be Engaging. If you write engaging content your readers will want to keep coming back. Not only will they want to come back, but they will also be more willing to share what you write with their friends.
3. Social Tools. Incorporating social sharing tools such as Addthis.com or Sharethis.com into your blog posts will provide easy options for your readers to share information with their friends. The search engines analyze social signals to determine which companies or websites people like as well as who is legitimate. They have incorporated those signals into their algorithms.
4. Length of Posts. Search engines do care about how many words a blog post has. They are looking for content with substance even though the length of a post isn’t a true gauge of that. I would recommend somewhere between 250-600 words. Just keep in mind that you shouldn’t be writing content just to meet a word quota. Quality content is always king.
5. Comments. I always recommend allowing comments. You want to stay connected to your readers. You also get an SEO benefit from the comment content being added to the page. Search Engines like it when pages are updated. Make sure you moderate often and have a comment spam solution in place.
6. Spelling and Grammar. The search engines pay close attention to spelling and grammar. There are several low quality websites that outsource their writing needs to content shops that just churn out low quality content. Sniffing out and devaluing that low quality content was and is one of the primary objectives for the Google Panda Updates.
7. Linking Strategies. When you are writing your posts don’t forget to look for opportunities to link to other content within your website. It is even better if you have the opportunity to link back to that content with a keyword phrase that you are trying to rank for on the linked page. It is also okay to link outside of your website if they are an authoritative source on the topic of your post. Obviously you won’t receive as much of a benefit as you would if you were linking to your own website, but the post could get some trust points with the search engines if they are quality sources. As for how many links you would have in a given post, I would try and limit that to 1-2 links per 200 words.
8. Tagging. After you have written your blog post, title, description, and keywords, you also generally have the option to set tags. Tags can be used for categorization by the search engines, but probably don’t hold much weight. Content will be the ultimate guide for their algorithms. When you tag try and keep the tags limited to ideas, concepts, locations, events, and product names. Don’t overuse tags either. I wouldn’t use more than 10 tags to categorize a blog post. In the vast majority of instances I will use 4 or less.