How To Boost Your Website SEO With Blog Posts
Behind the content and external links, one factor of SEO that many people seem to forget, or don’t understand the importance of, is internal linking on your website. In this blog, I will highlight why you should use blogs and articles to increase your internal linking opportunities with keyword-focused anchor text.
The Power of Internal Linking
Before we get into the easy steps to creating internal-linking blogs to boost your SEO, allow me to show you the pure power internal linking can have on your website.
At the start of February I began to track our positions for the keyword “SEO Wigan.” This is a search term in which we have not targeted at all: we have no content, blogs or a dedicated page for this keyword. As such, we weren’t even in the top 100 results and we had no tracking data at all on SEMrush.
I created a unique URL for the keyword, which then 301 redirects to our generic, non-keyword-optimised page. After creating a blog which I optimised for internal linking to this unique & redirecting URL and we shot up to position 56 by February 8th and at the time of writing (February 14th) we are sat at 52.
Sure, this won’t bring in much traffic but it sets the foundations and shows the pure power of internal linking alone – this keyword is not supported with a dedicated page, the page that is ranking isn’t even directly linked – it’s linked with a 301 redirect, and there are no advanced backlinks – just some good old fashioned internal linking and content syndication.
Keyword Research
As with any type of content creation in the eyes of an SEO, it must always start with proper keyword research. However, this may differ from your usual keyword research techniques. When you perform research for your pages, you are trying to rank that page for the search term. However, in the case of boosting internal links with blogs, you aren’t necessarily trying to rank your blog (although that would be a great bonus!) instead you are trying to help Google, and perhaps your website visitors, better understand what a specific page is about using keyword-rich anchor text – without fear of a Google penalty! This makes your keyword research a lot easier because, essentially, you have already completed this task! You are just using the same keyword, or a related keyword, to the ones you are trying to rank your pages for. Simples!
I have also written a great blog about keyword research for SEO, feel free to check it out if you need more help or information when picking a perfect keyword for your content!
Writing The Content
Now you know the keyword(s) you are trying to boost, you also have the general topic of what to talk about. For instance, if you were trying to boost the SEO Wigan service page, you have a general topic of search engine optimisation to talk about.
Now you have to get a specific question or problem in relation to that topic and create an amazing blog to answer/solve that question or problem!
Keeping with SEO, there are plenty of things to talk about: the latest Google algorithm updates, how-to guides on SEO, case studies on SEO projects you have completed – there are plenty of things you can blog about. Plus, just as any SEO would tell you, Google loves long-form content. Writing long-form content is great because search engines prefer it, and a longer piece of content means more opportunities for you to include your target keywords and related phrases!
Internal Linking
Now the actual reason why you’re creating the blog in the first place: internal linking. Once you have finished your great piece of content, read back through your blog and find all those lovely opportunities to link back to yourself – you can use very specific keyword-rich anchor text or a more generic keyword-related phrase. For instance, using the earlier example, “SEO Wigan” would be a very keyword-rich anchor text to target but we can also use a more generic anchor text such as “search engine optimisation” or you could even use both! Don’t forget, if you have used statistics, infographics or any type of references in your blog it’s a great idea to link back to the original authors of that information – both for SEO purposes and user experience.
Promote Your Blog
So you’ve got a great piece of long-form blog content, featuring useful keyword-rich internal linking opportunities to help boost your SEO on your important pages – now what? Just like any SEO, it’s time to get some backlinks to get all that juice flowing through your website! Promoting your blog is a little different than a page – I wouldn’t recommend trying to acquire guest-post backlinks to a post. Instead, it’s much more simple to promote your blog through content syndication and social media promotion. Share your blog on your company’s social media profiles, and syndicate (repost) your content on blogging platforms such as Medium.com. However, it is very important to remember to use the canonical tag when possible to show your blog is the original version – if the platform you are syndicating to does not allow the use of canonical tags then include a tagline at the bottom or top of your syndicated post like this:
“This blog was originally published on [your domain – link back to your blog]”
This is an easy way to help search engines understand that your blog is the original and averts content duplication disasters.
Learn More About SEO
As the SEO and PPC executive at Blue Whale Media, I have written a good number of blogs about SEO you may find interesting. Recently I have created a guide on how to do local SEO for your website in 2020, and how to rank higher with better keyword research techniques.
Do you have a website struggling to rank in search engines such as Google? Feel free to contact us at Blue Whale Media, we’re always here to chat about how our SEO services can help your business achieve the online presence it deserves.
