Blogging for SEO
With more dental practices blogging and/or querying the blogging process, this blog(!) highlights the values of the feature on your site and how it can positively affect the sites SEO with good practice. Publishing blog content at regular intervals has a number of advantages to any online brand (even a dental practice). Including,
- Building brand awareness
- Positioning oneself as a thought leader
- Demonstrating your practices and (your own) expertise
- Developing relationships amongst your peers
These are great and very worthwhile, but on top of this, the act of blogging has a great impact on the SEO of your site. To this end it can incite more crawling, ie the more you publish, the more your site gets crawled. It can add weight to your keyword strategy; think writing a blog about Invisalign. It can attract links, and generate social signals. Ultimately it can drive traffic to your site. Whilst these SEO values are up for grabs with blogging as with anything in SEO, there is an art to getting it right and fully optimising your blog will enhance the above benefits. Find below some useful tips to ensuring your blog is fully optimised.
1) Good Pagination
Organising your blog effectively might be the last thing on your mind when you just want to get your first one written, but very quickly you will be building up a wonderful archive of rich material that needs to be filed. A long list of posts on a single page with hundreds of blogs that requires hours of scrolling down is not very user friendly, so we recommend pagination. When implemented correctly pagination can encourage maximum ‘crawl depth’ and makes your content easier for search engines to access. Here are a few examples which we’ve all seen across the web.
2) Include Related Posts
By adding related posts to your blog page, you can optimise the link juice between them all. Adding a list of related articles that you have written gives them new life and makes them easier to find. It’s a great user experience tool too, and will more often than not result in more of your blogs being read. For the SEO value, by adding the content onto another page, and linking you are making it easier for the search engines to find your work. Most likely if they are related, there will be keywords in the anchor text so this just makes sense as a way to format your related blogs.
3) Add Previous and Next posts
By including links to your last and next blog, your effectively inviting the user to stay around a bit longer and read what else you have to say. Search engines like this and for the SEO of your site, having users who stick around sends positive signals to them that your sites providing great content. All things being equal this will give your rankings a positive boost.
4) Use of Categories properly
Besides making archived content easier to find, categories help classify and file your content into themes, which allows search engines easy access in order to crawl, index and rank. Make sure you limit the categories to make best effect of the above. Go for around 10-15 categories and file away sensibly.
5) Create Title Tags and relevant Article Tags
It’s easily overlooked, but your blog should have a strong, succinct heading with a keyword in it and the content should include keywords and variations of the keyword in a user friendly and spam-free way. Also ensuring the article URL is relevant;
Rather than
https://www.dental-design-products.co.uk/2013/05/24/122347862348726346
allows the search engines to find your great piece of writing easily. The latter not giving any clues as to what the content is about. We use WordPress SEO Plugin Yoast, which automatically provides an article URL from the heading your use, provided you add the heading in first on the post, before inputting the content
The title tags should be original and obviously include the keyword too.
6) Add sharing buttons
Exposing your content across platforms, not only promotes your blog to potentially gain more readers, but sends signals to the search engines that its popular, even more so if it gets shared along. It can increase your chances of getting mentions and links and enables your content to get found more quickly and therefore indexed quickly. Increasingly Google are making noises about social signals and whilst they are not (and are unlikely too) spell out the effect on rankings, clearly there is a degree of value. Make share buttons obvious and easy to use and if you can include a ‘share count’ then this helps to convey a sense of trust as the numbers stack up.
Create great content and get it read too by utilising these essential SEO tools. For more about blogging and it’s value to SEO call Dental Design on 01202 677277.
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