6 Blogging Secrets Revealed!

In the universe of SEO, blogging is invaluable. Why are blog posts useful for both your site's visitors and for SEO?

Blogging is an effective way to engage your website's visitors by providing them with useful information about your industry, but it is also a useful SEO technique. Here are the reasons why:

• Search engines like original, well written and useful content. The more unique and relevant the content, the more likely they are to visit your site regularly and index your site's content.
• People love linking to blog posts, so it's essentially a good way to get people to link to your content and grow your audience. 
• Community Building: By writing compelling blog posts, your site's visitors will comment more. This can boost brand awareness and credibility.
• Internal Linking: Linking to internal pages within a blog post (with keyword rich anchor text) gives those linked pages more weight in the eyes of the search engines. 

• Images, Charts and Graphs: The more "types" of content you can include in a post, the easier it is for the reader to digest the information.
• Lists: People like lists and the search engines love them; it helps them interpret the information on the page better. 

4 Important SEO Tips

What are some of the most important and helpful SEO Tips?

• Content is king; you need to write page content that flows naturally. It must be compelling for the reader as your site's content is not just for the search engines! 
• If you're really familiar with your CMS bells and whistles (for example, the bulk edit functionality on the SEO Yoast plugin in Wordpress allows you to make multiple edits to metadata at one time), your life as an SEO is made so much easier! 
• Create a call to action; a web. page needs to be about whatever your users were searching for! 
• Attract natural backlinks to your site (see my first point).

5 SEO Tips to Avoid Duplicate Content

What are some useful strategies in handling duplicate website content? Avoid duplicate content creation with these useful strategies:

1. Create unique and compelling pages, help your business thrive and avoid an obscured search presence. Don't force it; if you have to rack your brain to come up with more than 10 pages with unique themes, maybe 10 pages is all you need. 10 pages with great content are far more appealing to the user and the engines than a plethora of low quality and uninteresting pages.
2. Create an ONSITE blog or forum and consistently contribute to it.
3. Canonicalize: 301 redirect either the www or non-www, utilize rel=canonical and/or rel=next and rel=prev where necessary. 
4. Handle Your URL Parameters: Use the free tools provided by Google and Bing Webmaster Tools to alert them to URL elements on your site that indicate duplicate pages.
5. Use free tools, such as Copyscape: www.copyscape.com, to identify blocks of duplicate content on your own site or on external sites.