If your business has a blog there are some things you’ll want to check to be sure you’re covered. Doing a little SEO tuneup will be helpful in sending additional organic traffic to your blog.
Figuring out what SEO tweaking needs to happen is the first step. There’s lots of online resources regarding this process, but a nice simple process from Search Engine Land does a nice job of describing why B2B blogs aren’t achieving SEO success.
Here are some of the main points made by Galen:
Full posts on the home page
Not rewriting title tags
Lack of (optimized) alt tags on images
No control over what is indexed
Poor meta descriptions
No redirects
Below are some additional points on each one of those points.
Full posts on the home page can be easily fixed by adding a “More” tag wherever you want the break to occur. This is in the rich text editor of the wordpress add new post section.
Rewriting title tags is a matter of preference because something I don’t recommend is making the titles too optimized with keywords. It essentially can be considered spam if you’re using keywords that have no use being in a title. Titles should be written to entice the searcher to click on your result in the search engine.
Images are an important part of my SEO philosophy because I have seen tremendous results from this. A well optimized image file name, alt tag and quality image really is worth a thousand words in terms of what you’d get in traffic if you did it correctly.
Properly indexed is a matter making sure your site isn’t displaying duplicate content to the search engines. I’ve read up on the subject of Pagerank sculpting where SEO’s have suggested you structure your links to give your most desirable content the most authority. I’m not suggesting you stress out and start making big changes because you could likely make mistakes and break links along the way. Just don’t use tags like crazy because that could cause your site to index the posts twice.
Think of meta descriptions like a posting a message to Twitter, which only gives you 140 characters. Google actually gives you 160 characters but making the most of meta description tags will go a long way like SEOMoz explains:
You shouldn’t always write a meta description. Although conventional logic would hold that it’s universally wiser to write a good meta description yourself, rather than let the engines scrape your page, this isn’t the case. I use the general rule that if the page is targeting 1-3 heavily-searched terms/phrases, go with a meta description that hits those users performing that search. However, if you’re targeting longer tail traffic, for example with hundreds of articles or blog entries or even a huge product catalog, it can sometimes be wiser to let the engines themselves extract the relevant text. The reason is simple – when engines pull, they always display the keywords (and surrounding phrases) that the user searched for. If you force a meta description, you can detract from the relevance the engines make naturally. In some cases, they’ll overrule your meta description anyway, but it’s not always wise to rely on that.
This is another good point, especially if your site has duplicate meta description tags and you have difficulty modifying each one individually.
Sometimes a great description is more important than ranking in the #1 position in Google because if your message clear and easy then it’ll draw in the traffic.
No redirects when your visitor enters www or a non-www url for your site can cause issues. Select either one and be sure that you redirect to the one you’ve specified.
Conclusion
B2B Blogs are representative of your company and brand, and assuring that you’ve done a thorough job will give your readers a better experience, and also allow others to land on your site when performing searches that could lead to a new client.