Category Archives: Writing

SEO Best Practices: Blogging

Making sure your small business ranks well in the main search engines isn’t easy, but there are several SEO best practices that you can implement to increase the likelihood of achieving and/or maintaining a good ranking for relevant search terms.

If you spend any amount of time at all reading up on SEO, you’ll see the same mantra repeated over and over: content is king. Search engines are designed with the goal in mind of prioritizing websites that users are most likely to want to visit. Thus, if you make sure your website includes content that people are likely to be interested in and, consequently, link to, it earns your webpage virtual currency in the view of search engines.

For most businesses, descriptions of your products and business in and of themselves won’t necessarily bring the level of attention to your website that will encourage repeat visitors and links from related websites. One option for developing regular, enticing content is to begin a company blog.

The blog can be a mix of announcements directly related to your products and company, posts that speak more generally to your industry and any topics that are likely to be of interest to your customers. Its worth investing the time and resources into producing quality content whether you decide to maintain the blog yourself, or bring on writers to develop blog posts for you.

Starting a blog isn’t too difficult, many webhosting services have features that make it easy to install a WordPress blog. Designing it to look how you’d like it to and implementing SEO features can be a bit more of a challenge, but there’s a thriving support community for WordPress users and plenty of free templates, plugins and other resources to help you get started. You can always bring on a consultant to help create content and get your blog started.

If you’re still at a loss for the best topics to write about or how to get a blog going, spend some time seeking out blogs related to your industry to see what others are talking about. Seeing what works well for others is a good way to find ideas. Don’t be hesitant to leave comments and begin making yourself known as a contributor to the larger conversation happening about your industry online. A big part of developing a successful web presence is becoming part of an online community.

On Reading and Writing

I’ve always been a big reader. Writing came pretty naturally to me and I realized early on that the quality of my writing had a lot to do with the amount I read. The best way to develop a firm grasp of language and learn to communicate effectively in your writing is to spend a lot of time immersed in how great writers do it.

This always seemed like a fairly obvious truth to me: to be a good writer, you should first be a good reader. It was thus a surprise to encounter this Salon article that posits that there’s a new generation of aspiring writers with no interest in reading.

The evidence of this as a trend is largely anecdotal, so I’m not sure just how seriously to take it. That said, it’s difficult for me to imagine how someone would even come to the idea of wanting to make writing a focus of life without first cultivating the love of language, storytelling and knowledge that to me seem so intertwined with reading.

I often think of the history of literature as one long conversation. Different writers over time can borrow ideas and style techniques from one another to create something new. Shakespeare took stories from history and many of the great writers that came before him. Jorge Luis Borges, my personal favorite, often wrote of his preference for reading over writing and both his fiction and non-fiction essays are littered with ideas and references to other writers. Dante made this idea of writing as a continuing conversation over generations explicit with his use of Virgil in The Divine Comedy. The two even meet with several other poets in their time in Purgatory and discuss various issues related to poetry and religion*.

The written word allows us the great privilege of maintaining our knowledge of the ideas and stories of the brilliant men and women who came before us. If a writer rejects learning from the writers of our past, he or she lose the opportunity to be a part of the great conversation. So much of what’s been new and progressive throughout human history has come about due to our ability to build off of the ideas that came before. A refusal to embrace that means you’re likely to stay a few steps behind those that do.

*I might be the only person to read The Divine Comedy and prefer Purgatory to Inferno, specifically because I love the idea of Dante using it as an artistic outlet for having an imagined chat with his favorite writers.