Blogging For Search, Part 2

Search is the most democratic of all acquisition methods.

In fact, 44% of all web interactions begin with search. And while billions are spent on PPC and other ad-centric strategies, nearly all of the clicks on a search results page come from an organic area.

Why do blogs do so well in the organic search rankings?

There are a few key factors:

Factor: Page Titles

To quote SEO expert Steven Bradley: “By far the most important piece of writing you’ll do on any given page is your page title. Search engines consider your page title to be very indicative of what can be found on the page.”

Yes, it sounds obvious! The problem is that in traditional website strategy, you are dealing with a finite number of pages, which creates two problems.

You have a limited number of keyword phrases to target, so you often default to the most mainstream/competitive keyword titles.

The marketer often doesn’t have control of the title. Blogs, on the other hand, don’t suffer from this limitation. Think about your keyword strategy for PPC and use that as a guide for your blog titles. For example, if ExactTarget wants to rank well on the search term “blogging best practices,” they should name a blog this. And by “name,” I mean that they should title it “blogging best practices.” Titling by the appropriate keyword phrase is a highly scalable strategy, meaning that ultimately, you would have a blog titled with every one of your PPC keywords.

Along those lines, here are some tips:

• When writing page titles, place your keywords as close to the front of the title as you can.

• Don’t “stuff” with keywords. Titles still need to be readable and need to convince someone to click on them, even in the organic results. (Remember, it’s the actual page title that will show as your result and link in the search results. Obviously results that include the search terms that the searcher has used will be the most compelling ones!).

• Be wary of using titles such as “Rob’s Ramblings.” Every blog should have a meaningful title that includes specific keyword phrases for which you want to rank.

Factor: Keywords

The titles of your organization’s webpages is not the only place where keywords play a huge role. Search engines also love finding keywords within your content. The challenge is maintaining a “healthy range,” which simply means that the page is dense enough with keywords that it’s easy to identify it as relevant to the search at hand, but not so dense with keywords that it looks like you are writing a bunch of junk. That’s why keyword density is an area where more is not necessarily better. It comes down to the ratio of keywords to overall content.

Blogs have a significant advantage with respect to keywords because, by nature, they are comprised of a lot of words. On the other hand, a regular website page has a finite amount of room for written content. But with blogs, the content will continue to grow over time, which translates into thousands of words, and thousands of keyword phrases. The sheer volume maintains that all important “healthy range.”

By initiating an organization-wide blogging strategy, you will naturally introduce a lot of content contributors. Not only does this increases the overall amount of content that your organization is able to generate, but also the variations on the keyword phrases you are trying to rank on in organic search.

It’s important to accept the fact that you, as a marketer, cannot control how a searcher will describe his or her problem or need. In fact, it’s a lot like the game Pictionary. The guy who has been tasked with drawing the word “jumping” can’t understand why his team can’t figure out that his picture is the perfect rendition of the word. I’d venture to say that if you had ten people trying to draw the same word, you would wind up with at least seven variations of the same thing.

The prospective customers searching for your business online are a lot like the team members trying to guess the Pictionary word – and your best bet for winning is by casting a wide net with lots of keywords and lots of content. The more content and the more keywords, the more chances for there to be a “match” when they look for you.