How to optimize your blog for longer viewing time

With all the hype around blogging as part of digital marketing, you’re probably thinking of starting a blog if you don’t already have one.  Before you set out to create your blog make sure you have goals in place so you’re not wondering blindly with content, timing, and style with your blogging.

Are blogs really different from a traditional website?  Blog content is referred to as ‘blog posts’ and presents information in a conversational style, which is where the difference to a website comes in.  Unlike a website, blogs are updated regularly with new content and are displayed in reverse chronological order, meaning the newest blogs appear first.

There are a wide variety of blogging tools available and the most popular blogging platform by far is WordPress.  If you’re thinking of starting a blog or are already well on the way to becoming a star blogger, it’s worthwhile completing a digital marketing course to keep your blogs up to date with the latest blogging trends.

Creating blogs

Getting your content out to the world has never been easier and learning how to optimize your blog posts is certainly time well spent.  The competition is huge, but don’t let that put you off blogging as there are many ways to optimize your blog to keep your reader hooked.

Besides the obvious reason of creating a strong online presence, here are a few reasons why you should focus on your blogging as part of your SEO and digital marketing strategy.

1. Uncomplicated content publishing – Writing content for your blog is really a straightforward process, if you know how to use Word then publishing content on your blog is easy.
2. Easy to create – Not everyone is a webmaster, this is why blogging is so popular as it’s really easy to create a blog.  There’s no complex designing or site developing needed.
3. Brand promotion – To cut through all the digital marketing noise on the web, a blog is a good place to promote your brand through your blogs.  This is the perfect tool to reach out to your target audience.
4. Website traffic generation – All the search engines lap up new content and compared to a static website, interesting blogs is a great way to generate traffic to your website.

Blog keywords and content

As with all SEO strategies content is king, so it stands to reason that great content must be a strong key element in all aspects of your complete digital marketing plan.  Finding the right keywords in incorporate in your blogs will give your blog posts a better chance to rank well in Google and other search engines.

A good way to optimize your blog is to include your keywords in your headings.  Keeping this tactic in mind, the blog title is really the most important.  Once you have created knock-out content the next step is optimizing your blog post for the search engines. 

Increasing readership of your blog

As this article shows almost anyone can write and create a blog, but that’s the easy part.  Driving traffic and creating a loyal audience is an essential part of modern-day blogging.   Part of any SEO campaign is to boost traffic not only to your website but to your blog as well.  This is where taking the time to understand your target audience is crucial.

Do some research on who you think will be interested in reading your blog and why.  Understanding your audience is crucial to getting high-quality traffic to your site.  Knowing what your audience wants to read is a big part of making your blog a success, which in turn ensures that a reader spends a longer time viewing your blog.

Producing consistent content

A good point to start, and of course, to stick to is decide how often you want to release new blogs.  The frequency of posting a blog will depend on how many topics you intend to cover and your capability to produce really good content that will draw in a returning audience and increase longer viewing time of your blog

No one wants to be faced with a wall of text, so adding visual content to your blog is a really great strategy.