Your Business Blog: Tagging, Linking, Liking, and More

If you have a blog for your small business, congratulations! Blogging is one of the most effective marketing platforms available for you, yet most entrepreneurs are still not taking advantage of having a blog. So go ahead pat yourself on the back, because you’re one step ahead. And if you don’t yet have a blog, I suggest you look into the advantages and get started.

Getting started with blogging is really quite simple. It doesn’t take long to get up to speed. Once your blog is in place, publishing your content online just takes a quick click. Poof! It’s on the world wide web.

But the problem many people run into is thinking “if you build it, they will come.” If you haven’t figured it out by now, let me tell you - that’s not going to happen. For your target market to find your blog online, there are some key extra steps you’ll need to take.

By taking the steps to optimize your blog, more people will be able to easily find you and locate the specific kind of information they’re looking for. I could go over a long list of things you can do to position your blog for ultimate search friendliness, but here are a few tweaks you can make right away:

Tagging

Tagging your blog is a way of labeling it for improved search. You know those clouds of jumbled words you see in sidebars sometimes? That’s a tag cloud. Tags are a way to let readers know what topics are covered in each blog post. By glancing at a tag cloud, visitors can see which topics are discussed most often on your blog.

Tags are different than categories because they are non-linear and non-hierarchical. In other words, tags are a more natural way of signaling what’s inside from a bird’s eye view. Search engines use tags to help sort out what whether a user might be interested in visiting your blog.

Linking

Linking is another way to increase the usefulness and search friendliness of your blog. By inserting links into your blog – both internal and external – you are helping both readers and search engines pick up on the kind of information contained within your blog.

By inserting an external link, which is a link out to another website, you are directing readers to useful information someone else has posted. When you do this, you are putting a spotlight on a particular content within your site for the search engines, as well as illustrating that your site is a resource that is in conversation with other sites. Inserting external links can also potentially put you on the radar of the owner of the site to which you linked by pinging that site.

Exchanging links with someone else’s site is another way of increasing your visibility. Eventually, as you provide useful content, others will naturally link to your site. Until then, contact your colleagues and seek out other relevant sites to ask them to link back to your site. Ideally, their visitors will click on the link to get to your site. Another bonus is search engines view incoming links as an endorsement or validity, so this will boost your search engine rankings.

Internal links, which are links to other locations on your site, also spotlight particular content for search engines. Internal links call attention to the fact that you discuss a topic in more than one place. For readers, it illustrates that your site is a richer resource than it might have been otherwise. They will spend more time on your site, which increases the chances of eventually spending money with you.

Liking, Tweeting, etc.

Another way of driving more traffic to your blog is by using social media plug-ins. One of the things people share most often on social media are links to interesting and useful blog posts. If one of your friends or someone you respect suggests that you check out a blog post, you’re more likely to read it, right? Well, make it easier for people to share your blog posts by adding a simple Facebook “like” button or Twitter share plug-in.

RSS Subscription

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. You know - the (usually) orange box with white arches in it you see on blogs? It’s how people sign up to receive your blog posts automatically, either to an RSS reader or to their email inbox. This way, if someone likes content you’ve written in a post, they’ll keep coming back for more and more and increase the likelihood of eventually doing business with you or referring a business to you. If you don’t have an RSS button, go ahead and add one now.

So now you know just a few ways to tweak your blog to get more readers. It’s not rocket science, but it does take a little know-how. Now that you now, you’ll have more readers in no time and your blog will become the marketing platform you want it to be.

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