It’s been awhile since my last post so forgive me for the spelling and grammatical errors that are sure to follow.

For anyone interested in promoting their small business online I think you will find this post valuable. For people who aren’t familiar with the term Search Engine Optimization (SEO) let me explain. SEO is the process of increasing a website’s visibility within major search engines. So for example a website that has utilized SEO effectively will rank higher within Google, causing it to display on say the first page of search results opposed to the 9th page. Many techniques go into a comprehensive SEO campaign such as:

- Link Building
- Social Networking
- Social Bookmarking
- On-site Optimization
- Article submissions
- Ect.

The list goes on and on. However, I am going to show you a practical example of how using a blog can greatly increase your SEO efforts.

The Blog Details:

One of my clients is Ace Custom Fabrication a Calgary welding company that specializing in oil field equipment fabrication. Over the last few months I have been working closely with them to build their search engine rankings using some of the techniques I described above. In the last two months, however, we have shifted our focus to article creation and syndication, which has had amazing results.

In February, 2011 we developed a blog titled Five Ways To Select A Calgary Welding Company. The blog is about 450 words in length and contains useful information for the average business owner looking to hiring a welding company. The blog is posted on the Ace Custom Fabrication website under the News section (the news page on a website is really a “blog” in disguise). And some clever content structuring has been used to make the blog more search engine friendly.

The Result:

In less than two weeks the blog post has gone from not ranking for the keyword phrase “Calgary Welding Companies” to ranking on the first page in Google. Not bad for less than two weeks of work.

How and Why It Was Successful

There are a few major contributing factors to this particular blog’s success.

WordPress:

For starters the website was built using WordPress which allows for key SEO characteristics. For anyone not familiar with WordPress it is an open source Content Management System (CMS) that allows the average person or business to manage a website. This includes adding images, content, blogs, photo galleries, ect.

Keywords and Writing Content:

Selecting the keywords is a step we completed at the beginning of the SEO process. We decided to target the phrase “Calgary Welding Companies” because it is a highly searched term and is also relevant to the content on our client’s website. Therefore the first step was to create a blog title that encapsulated these keywords.

The second step was to insert references to the keywords throughout the blog. This is often the biggest challenge because keyword stuffing can make a blog choppy and difficult to read. Plus stuffing keywords in a blog for SEO doesn’t work like it used to, today search engines are more finely tuned to identify when you are trying to outsmart them.

Title Tag:

The title tag is metadata that tells the Search Engines what your web page is about. WordPress auto-populates the title tag with the name of the blog making it extremely relevant to any search results relating to Calgary Welding Companies (remember our title was “Five Ways to Select A Calgary Welding Company”). That is why selecting a keyword rich title is extremely important to ranking for related keywords.

The URL

Once again it’s WordPress to the rescue. WordPress now grabs the title of the blog and creates a URL with the keywords. Now we have references to our keywords in the title, the URL, and the body content.

Article Syndication

Now that you have your amazing, keyword rich article posted on your website what do you do with it? Well now is the time to let the world know about your greatness. The web is literally littered with article directory websites which provide one way backlinks when you submit content. You’ll notice at the bottom of the article we inserted a few links back to our website. Although it may look as though we are simply inserting our contact information, the links we inserted have much greater value.

For starters the blogs will be published on the article directories, providing backlinks to the Ace website. Secondly, the web contains some unscrupulous webmasters referred to as scrappers. Scrappers basically steal content from one website and republish it on their own website in an attempt to rank for your keywords. Now in some cases this can be bad because it leads to duplicate content issues (a problem that forces Google to choose which article was created first, then attribute negative rankings to duplicate versions of the content) but in many cases, since we embedded a link in the article, we will now have a one way link pointed to our website. Awesomeness!

Here is a really awesome list of 50 article directories that you can submit your website to.

Conclusion:

So those are a few simple techniques that can be used to increase your business blog’s ranking. The positive effects of blogging, however, go far beyond just link building and search engine ranking. A blog can also help to position you, or your company as the authority on any given topic. This traditionally leads to free PR opportunities, media coverage, and more juicy links.