Ok, so whether you run a freelance writing business, or are someone who hires freelance writers, you need your business blog to rank higher in the search engines.
That’s right, even if your fully SEO-optimized blog ranks #1 for your targeted keywords, it needs to rank higher for other keywords and other searches. How do you do that?
SEO can (an is) be a long tedious process of trial and error, as well as the consistent application of several tried and true techniques. But, there are some things that you can do without even trying that will push your blog up through the search engine rankings. One of those things is frequent updates.
Google Loves Blogs and It Has a Frequent Update Fetish
Google and the other search engines have many flaws, most of which stem from trying to force a computer to make a value judgment. One of the kinks in Google’s algorithm has to do with the “freshness” of a site. That is, all other things being equal, a website that has been updated more recently will rank higher. While this is certainly not the end story, it is a fact, and an easily exploited one.
To take advantage of this part of the Google ranking algorithm you need to do just one thing. Update your blog frequently. There is some disagreement over how frequently is necessary, but the consensus generally is that at least weekly updates are the minimum and that anything more frequent than daily updates brings little boost. So, shoot for somewhere in between daily and weekly.
Setup Weekly Mini-Posts As An Insurance Policy
That sounds easy on paper, but sooner or later you will get busy. Business will take off, family will come to town, babies will get sick, you will get sick. Whatever it is, during that time it will be darn hard to update your blog.
To combat the inevitable, take a block of free time and sit down and write out a dozen or so posts for your blog. Not full posts, but rather short and sweet ones. Make sure they are related, but they do not need to be full length. Two hundred, or even one hundred words is all you need.
While that length is too short for maximum SEO effect, it will keep your frequency up, which is more important. Besides, unless you go into super-slacker mode for two weeks, only one or two of these will get posted in a row, so your front page will be full of better length posts.
Type up quick anecdotes, funny stories, fictional events, definitions, quirks of industry, whatever you want, as long as it is related and evergreen (something that is fresh at a later date). Then, save these posts as drafts. Now, set each one to post on a certain day of the week every week for as many weeks as you have posts. That gives you a guaranteed weekly post for the next several weeks.
To best utilize this system, every week you make a “real” post, go into your dashboard and change the future publication date of the automatic filler post that was supposed to happen that week to the week after your last little post is scheduled to go up. That stretches out your efforts as long as possible.
Get twenty or thirty of these little guys written and ready to go and your blog posting insurance policy can easily last you up to 2 years because you’ll be publishing full posts at least some of the time.
Hire ArcticLlama To Do It For You
Don’t want to write up a bunch of mini-posts, or don’t think you can come up with enough topics. That, my friend, is what professional freelance writers are for. Give us the topic (or better yet, point us to your existing site) and we’ll work up a bid. Don’t worry, it will be fast and easy, which means it will also be cheap.
In the meantime, keep those blogs up to date and watch your site move up the search results pages.
G’Day! Thellama,
Thanks for your thoughts, A search engine ranking improvement for a site is not accomplished immediately. It takes its own time as the optimization process is quite complex for bigger sites. However, if you want to improve search engine rank for your site you can do it quite drastically by simply concentrating on the basics of the site’s lay out and content.
BTW great blogpost