Blog Maintenance and Optimization

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Blog Maintenance and Optimization (75 KB)

Maintaining Your Blog

How often should I update my blog?

You should try to update your blog one to three times a week. This encourages people to follow you because they will know that you update regularly. Frequent blog/website updates are also a factor in getting Google to crawl your website more frequently (and perhaps improve your website rankings).

How long should my blog posts be?

Do your best to keep your blog posts brief - no more than two to three paragraphs max. If you find that your blog post is getting long, consider breaking up the blog post into multiple blog posts. You could even start a blog post "series."

What should I post about?

• News from within (or about) your industry or field of work
• Useful tips
• Tools of the trade
• Resources and links to other websites in your industry
• Case studies
• Lists (we're leaving this one pretty open because people seem to love lists of all kinds!)
• Infographics (graphic visual representations of information)
• Problems you've encountered in your line of work and how you solved them
• Questions frequently asked by clients/prospects
• Industry chatter or controversies
• New products/services
• Opinions and editorials

Where can I find ideas about what to post on my blog?

Check out what people are writing on your Facebook wall, whether as wall posts or comments. Are they asking questions? Maybe they have questions that you can answer in a blog post.

Find other blogs in your industry. Use Technorati.com, AllTop.com and blogs.com to find blogs in your industry. You should pick a few blogs to follow. When appropriate, leave comments on their recent blog posts, and leave a link to your website in the comment.

Use Twitter's search. Find Twitter accounts of other people in your industry. Follow them and see what they are talking (tweeting) about. Then use these topics as idea generators for your blog posts.

Search LinkedIn for questions related to your business' industry. Answer these questions in blog posts (and also answer them on LinkedIn itself, with a link back to your website).

How else can I optimize my blog posts?

Make sure to use good keywords in your blog posts that you think people will be searching for. In particular, you will want to make sure that you blog post's title contains at least one good keyword phrase.

In your blog posts, you should try to find opportunities to link to particular pages on your website in your blog post - not your home page, but individual pages on your site. You can also link to your past blog posts where appropriate. The anchor text for these links should use good keywords that users will be searching for.

Make sure you "tag" each blog post with a tag (or category, depending on the blog platform). If your blog platform allows it, when you create your blog, you should create a list of tags/categories to use on future posts. However, some blog platforms will only allow you to create a tag/category if you're using said tag to immediately tag an existing blog post. Make sure that your tags/categories contain good keywords that people will be searching for on search engines.

Be mindful of how you format the text in your blog post, such as using bold or italic. Using bold and italic should be reserved for good keywords that users might be searching for. Some search engines use bold and italic text as a ranking factor.

Promoting Your Blog

Make sure that your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts announce your blog posts whenever you post one. There are tools built into Facebook and LinkedIn to do this automatically (although Facebook's built in tool is buggy - there are third party apps to replicate this functionality). To learn how to set this up, view our maintenance guides for each of these types of social media accounts.

Make sure that you have a link to your RSS feed somewhere on your blog. This is what allows blog visitors who like what they read to subscribe to your blog, and receive a notice in their email inbox each time you post. If you don't know how to add this link, your web developer can help you.

Add a "Share" button to each of your blog posts. A "Share" button is a widget that enables your visitors to easily share your blog posts on places like Facebook, Twitter, and so on. If you don't know how to add a Share button, talk to your web developer.

Comment on other blogs in your industry and leave a link back to your website/blog.

Answer Industry-related LinkedIn questions. Search for questions on LinkedIn that you can answer. When you find a relevant question, respond and include a link to your website/blog.