Business Blogging 101 Part 3

Driving traffic to your business blog

- Rick Allen, “The Publicity Expert”

How does SEO play a part in your business blog and bottom line profits?

Your blog is only valuable as a marketing tool if people see it and respond to it.

SEO, or search engine optimization is vital for the survival of your business, you must have good search engine ranking to be found. Being struck on page 20 of the search engine results, or page 3 or 4, just isn’t going to bring enough traffic to your online business efforts.

This is how a search engine finds you. When someone is looking for something they type into the search bar, what they feel are relevant terms. The search engine then spiders out and locates what it feels are the best matches for those search terms and in a ranking order lists the web sites that appear to be the most relevant to the terms.

So, how do you get a good placement in the search engines?

Well the simple answer would seem to be dumb luck! Actually however you can turn that “luck” in your favor by knowing some secrets about how searcdh engines rank internet sites.

Number one, a search engine will often give a blog preference over a standard web page. The logic is that a blog will contain more information related to the search and yes your blog should. When people are searching for information on a subject, they are not necessarily shopping (although yes, sometimes they are, with credit card in hand.) more often however they are more apt to be looking for information about a certain subject. With that in mind you will want to have what are termed content rich blog pages. For example, if your blog is about NASCAR, you are going to want to be sure that your blog includes popular terms such as Busch series, Dale Earnhardt, NASCAR fan, NASCAR merchandise, nascar racing, NASCAR sponsors, Tony Stewart, and of course the main keyword, NASCAR. These are just a few terms that came up in a search I just did, there are hundreds more.

Finding the right keywords is not as difficult as you may first think.

Put yourself in you potential customers mind and think of keywords that they would think of to search for information about your business, product or service. Write down everything you can think of, even ask a few customers, friends, family what they would look for.

Now, I’ll give you a little secret weapon to find tons of keywords that are relevant to your business.

Google is one of the top search engines on the planet. They also are very helpful with finding you targeted keywords, in hopes of selling you PPC (pay per click) through their Adwords program. That is another whole separate discussion we will get to someday. The big thing is they will help you find the relevant search terms you need.

Simply go to: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com

This is provided by Google absolutely free. Take the terms you came up with as being relevant and type them in, per their instructions like magic in a matter of seconds you will have hundreds of suitable keywords to use in your blog. The end result is that the search engines generally will give you preference, (as long as you do have relevant information), in your blog over a pure sales type web site.

Now, this is not the total answer to getting a top ranking in the search engines, it is only a part, but an important part to the overall picture of getting high SEO placement in the search engines.

Just keep in mind the more relevant keywords you use in your blog the more traffic you will drive to your blog.

And, although it can rank your blog quickly, sometimes in a matter of hours or less, it can sometimes take time and patience to get it all right.

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Rick Allen is a recognized expert on PR and self promotion to enhance your business and make bottom line profits.Your comments and suggestions are always welcome.

International copyright 2009, Rick Allen all right sreserved. You have permission to reprint this artical in your e-zine, blog, or newsletter as long as the resource blog is kept intact and Rick allen is given credit as the author.