WordPress Tips

The early days of blogging were fun. You could post anything and share your passion anyone else around the globe who shared your passion. Whether it was automotives, cooking, philosophy, or cats, the audience was there waiting for you. However, over the last couple of decades, blogging has gone from a fun hobby to a career. What a great way to make money!

But, blogging has a different use as well, a use that we stress with our clients at all times. Today’s search engines ding static content. They seek out fresh, relevant, and intelligent content to reward with higher SEO rankings. Your ecommerce site simply cannot go without a blog. And, you need a blogger, if not yourself, to craft superior content.

If you are writing your own blogs, we have pulled together some blogging tips with fun and SEO in mind.

Write About What You Know

Even our sixth grade English teachers taught us that one. Focus on what you know and love. If this is your business blog, obviously you know the topic. Your passion will show through in you writing, and blogging will be much more manageable and enjoyable for you.

If you want to expand into more article that are relevant to your business, but perhaps you are seeking another voice of authority, add authors to your team. Many WordPress themes include support for additional authors in addition to custom author pages.

You may want to add authors with limited access to your blog and website. You can do this through plugins that restrict and define user roles, such as admin, subscribers, contributors, and others. You can then assign the specific role to your registered users.

Create Relevant Content

Just what is relevant content? Relevant content goes beyond subject matter that relates to your product or service. Search engines, in particular Google, are seeking content to relate to their services as well. For instance, if you have a designer boutique, a blog post should go beyond a description of a new item. It should also include current events at which you may wear the item, other uses for the item, or complimentary accessories. The descriptions should be specific. A hat should be a brimmed, straw hat perfect for the beach, or a flannel ski cap with matching gloves. Google will take that info and relate it to offerings for ski lift tickets or a sale on sun screen at a local retailer.

Another crucial issue is to keep your focus on your business. Blogging to create cash flow through blogging is one thing and very trendy. Blogging to drive visitors and conversions is another.

Make Your Articles Interesting

If you stick to what you know, this will be so much easier. Keep it interesting doesn’t mean using every word in the dictionary, but an occasional consultation with a thesaurus will help with flow. Find your writing style and develop your voice. A Google search will result in many great articles on writing tips and how to keep the flow interesting.

The Great Headline

Yes, you want something to catch someone’s pique, but you also need it to work with Google. A great headline for a hobby blog can be very different for a business blog designed to keep content fresh and relevant. However, we have some key features to keep in mind as you craft your headline.

• Urgent: When possible your headline should convey urgency or a call to action. Show that the content is something the users can use today. It can also convey something to share free, but only for a limited time.
• Unique: This is critical especially in the world of electronic plagiarism checkers. Don’t copy and paste other’s work. Google and other search engines will find it and punish your site with lower rankings. If you think about it, you have probably searched for information on the web only to find the same content on every site. It’s annoying.

We are going to cover the subject of headlines more in our next blog post, so check back or subscribe. You can also contact us today for a free consultation on how to make your content better.