Many companies believe that they can boost their websites’ SEO and then won’t need to do anything further to obtain and keep good rankings. However, these companies will likely be disappointed as Google has incorporated freshness and social media buzz into its algorithm. It means fresh content and daily updates are essential for getting high SERP. And blogging provides an effective format for this purpose.
Google’s obsession with human-generated contents may indicate the relative popularity leads directly to various types of social media interactions in the form of commenting, retweeting, reposting, sharing, emailing links, votes, likes, check-ins, pressing play on videos, and more. All of these things are types of user interactions that Google could potentially quantify for ranking determinations.
The Importance of Interaction
Very simply, all of these things boil down to one broad definition: interaction.
Since the interactions of users in relation to your site, your business, your location and your content are all things that may now affect your rankings, you need to come up with ways to increase the number of interactions. You can’t do that with a set-it-and-leave-it site. The question is, how do you do that?
Blogging is Important
Google appears to give an unusual degree of ranking value to blogs, even when they’re fresh out of the box. Sites that are based on a blog as a content management platform can often enjoy natural page rankings more rapidly than non-blog sites. This natural ranking advantage seems to happen even before the blog has properly developed an audience, and it goes to show that a number of blog characteristics lend some search optimization — the on-page construction including titles, headlines and content text, the keyword-based URLs, categories and tags. So, just implementing a blog lends a few advantages, but you must actively post to the blog to get the potential to fully deliver.
Posting on your blog can get you in Google’s regular keyword search results as well as into blog search results. So, your blogging activity could result in a bit more exposure than merely posting a webpage. RSS feeds for blogs allow your posts to be syndicated out to other sites, apps, and feed readers.
The act of blogging is dynamic by its very nature. Blogging tends to invite interaction — blogs often allow users to comment, and other bloggers can comment about your posts from their own blogs, too. Pages in blog format also lend themselves to being shared more frequently as well, as readers will email posts to friends and add your blog post links to their own social media sites, if the content is interesting.
What’s cool is that your blog posts provide fuel for your social media presence on multiple other sites as well. Each time you publish a post, you should also post the link to it on your various social media accounts such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. If you’re posting a photo, you can also post it with a link back to your blog post on Flickr and Pinterest. If you post a video on YouTube, embed it into a post on your blog as well.
As you consistently broadcast your activities across multiple platforms, you have the opportunity to engage with the unique audiences at each place. Ideally, you should work to develop your followers at each of the places you are broadcasting. But, even if you don’t have time to do that, simply broadcasting is beneficial since it helps to maintain buzz related to your business, keeping you fresh in the eyes of the algorithm.
Seven Blogging Tips for Social Media Effectiveness
Here are seven highlights of effective social media optimization via blogging.
- Use WordPress for your blog platform. No other blog platform comes close to the optimizations that are native to WordPress, fresh out of the box.
- Optimize for SEO. Make sure your blog is optimized for search engines at inception. While WordPress will likely be fairly optimal with the default install, there are numerous small tweaks you can do to fine-tune your advantages
- Post Twitter and Facebook links to your blog posts. And, when you do, use optimal URL shorteners — they’re not all alike.
- Automate where appropriate. There are a number of software services out there to help you in distributing your links to posts to your various social media accounts. Using these effectively can save on manual updating grunt-work.
- Consider expert help. Companies often do a poor job of the initial setup of their social media profiles. Consider hiring an expert for some short-time work in setting up your profiles. Professionals can help you establish a stronger and faster presence.
- Post on your blog regularly and frequently. Blogs that have frequent posts work far more effectively at gaining traction and influencing rankings. Don’t just copy your content from somewhere else, though. Google considers scraper blogs to be its enemy. Not sure what to post on a frequent basis? Again, consider hiring professionals to help you produce original content.
- Monitor analytics. Check your performance with various analytics packages to see how you’re growing your influence. Google Analytics can tell you how many clicks you may get from your social activities, while services like Klout can help quantify your influence.
Conclusion
Your online presence is being assessed more as an interlocking, holistic entity that can be made up of multiple parts. Your blog should be the heart of it. The sooner you adopt consistent blogging activities, the sooner you’ll unlock your optimal web rankings.