Budding Lotus Designs Blog

Get me to the top, please.

If you own a website, SEO is  one of those acronyms that you hear a lot, and you probably know that your website should have it…but do you know how to get it and what it means?  Basically the goal is how to get good old Google, Yahoo etc to show your business in the top rankings. It helps to understand what the main elements of SEO are and how you can actively improve your rankings.

This may come as a suprise to you, but the top SEO boost for your website is calculated by incoming links. Incoming links, means links from other websites that recommend you. It is important to know that search engines also weigh the quality of the link, and it is more useful to have fewer high quality links than tons of links coming from low ranking sites. All in all, lots of links are good, but over time it is best to work on accumulating links from quality sources. It is more important to be linked from businesses that are similar to yours in service and quality. It is also highly beneficial to have links from websites that are well known (and well ranked) for example if a well-established online magazine or newspaper does an article on your business and links to your site.  This has been referred to as “link-love“.

On the topic of links, search engines also “appreciate” links from your website to other websites. Search engines are known to “crawl” the web, traveling from one site to the other, and if you have created “paths” for them it keeps them moving, and gives them another chance to make associations about your website. Links from your website will benefit you as well by telling the search engine what businesses are similar to yours by nature, quality, location etc.

If you are starting to wonder how you can accumulate more incoming links, one thing to consider is to start a blog for your website. Blogs are arguably the second best way to boost your search engine rankings, for many reasons. In reference to incoming links, a blog gives you more of an opportunity for people to link to your site. If you write an article, demostrating your expertise on a topic related to your business, it creates the opportunity for another blogger to refer to your article in their blog.

A blog will also boost your website in other ways. Search engines are happier to find a website that is updated frequently. They will rank your site higher if you are updating frequently, and if you are writing articles for a blog that is hosted on the same domain name as your website, this is an easy way to tell search engines to keep checking for updates!

The topics that you write about will also help your SEO rankings. Assuming that your blog is associated with your business, the articles that you write will add numerous opportunities for search engines to associate you with keywords that you want to be found by when someone declares a search. For example if your business is selling cookies online, and you write articles about the history of chocolate chip cookies, share a recipe for oatmeal raisin cookies, write about cookies appropriate for each season, or beverages that compliment the cookies that you sell… All of these topics, related to your cookies, will bring up more opportunities for the search engines to identify your business correctly with proper keywords. I will go into this in more detail in future articles, but this gives you an idea of how a blog can benefit you.

A blog also puts you in greater control of your own SEO. Most people are looking for the DIY-approach for their business, and blogging is a great solution!  You can have a blog set up for you, and designed to match your website, but from there, you are the author and can update it whenever you want. This means that you are actively boosting your SEO each time you write.

Blogs can be a huge topic to talk about and for now I just wanted to introduce the idea for you. I will be happy to answer questions as well, so let me know what wheels are turning now that you have learned a little more about SEO and blogs. I look forward to connecting.