One of the biggest mistakes you’ll see in business blogs these days is off-topic content. This not only hurts the site in terms of SEO value, but gives the readers information that they frankly probably couldn’t care less about. This is an important suggestion for any blog, but it’s especially relevant for business blogs. Depending on your niche, it can be easy to stray off the main topic, but time and time again we see that focused, niche-oriented blogs, perform the best.

Why is that the case? Think about it from your readers’ points of view. People want a guarantee of what they will find when they go back to a website. If you go to Inc.com, what will you find? Business tips and entrepreneurial news. If you go to food.com, you get recipes. These websites have a formula and it hinges around staying focused on their main niche. If Inc suddenly started posting recipes, you’d probably lose interest pretty fast, as would most of their readership. The point isn’t necessarily that those readers don’t like recipes; it’s just that they don’t go to Inc to get them.

Your blog should be laser targeted on a single niche, and every post needs to bring something new to the table regarding that niche. We’ve talked before on how to introduce variety, but how can you do that while still keeping the same focus on your blog?

#1- Figure Out Your Goal For Your Blog

Before doing anything, figure out what exactly you expect to get out of blogging. Is it to bring in more sales? To increase your brand exposure? To educate people on what you do? Something that seems plain cut on the outside can have multiple different angles once you dig deeper. Write down some different goals and then figure out what your main focus is.

#2- Research Keywords

Once you have your goal figured out, do some research on specific keywords that people may be using to find that information that you plan to provide. Keywords are obviously important for SEO, but they can serve to help you stay focused with your posts. Anytime you think of a new post, review your keywords to see if it matches with your original goals. If throwing the keywords in would make it awkward, it’s probably not the best post for your blog.

#3- Figure Out a Specific Topic In Your Industry

Try to pinpoint a specific topic or skill set within your industry that you know a lot about. Let’s say your company sells and installs AC units, but you know quite a bit about changing out filters and which types of filters work well in various units. You can run with that and turn your blog into a go-to source for filter changing advice. That’s a specific example, but you can apply the same logic to any type of industry.

#4- Give Your Audience What They Want

Finally, focus on what your audience wants to read. Use your market research here and figure out what type of people you want to attract to your blog. What would these people search for when they want information? And, what will ultimately take them to your products/services page to make a purchase?

For the most part, this includes optimizing your site content, titles, URL, image “alt” tags, and sub-headers. We’ll look at what all that means in just a second.

The main idea with on-site SEO is to get your keyword density right; that’s all that matters in the end. Too few keywords, and your site gets missed by search engines, but too much and you might get flagged for keyword stuffing.

Choosing Your Main Keyword

The best results come from optimizing each page for a specific keyword. You can have several pages optimized for the same keyword, but try not to have too many keywords stuffed into one page. It sounds confusing, but look at this example: Let’s say you want to optimize your Home page for the keyword “cheap auto loans.”

You would then place that specific phrase – cheap auto loans – into the text as many times as it makes sense. That’s important; some site owners make the mistake of compromising the flow of their content so they can stuff the keyword in as many times as possible. Search engines will spot that in an instant and boot you down in the rankings.

Another common mistake is trying to rank for multiple keywords on one page. With the same example, you might throw in “cheap car loans,” “best auto loans”and“car loan help” in addition to the main keyword on the same page. Search engines see this and have trouble figuring out what the page is actually about, and as a result it ranks poorly for all of the keywords.

So where do you put the keywords on the page? Here are the most important areas of your site to focus on:

Content – Self explanatory really; all the normal written content on your site should be optimized for keywords.

Titles – The main header on your page uses the <h1> tag, which is where search engines look first to determine a site’s relevance. Whenever possible, put the keyword right in the title or header.

Sub-headers – It’s a good idea to place sub-headers throughout your site content for two reasons: 1) It’s easier for visitors to read, and 2) The header tag (<h2> or <h3>) will be picked up by search engines.

URL – Whenever you add a new page, most hosting interfaces will automatically make the URL the same as the title, with the option for you to change it. For example, the Home page on your site has a URL of yoursite.com/home. If you have a page dealing mostly with cheap auto loans, change the URL to yoursite.com/cheap-auto-loans for better search visibility.

Image “alt” tags – Since search engines can’t see images, they read the “alt” tags instead, which are a description of the image. Whenever you upload a picture, go into the HTML and change the “alt” to one of your keywords (as long as it matches the picture).

When you search for a phrase in Google or Yahoo, or any other search engine, you receive a list of relevant results. If you are like most people, your first inclination is to click on one of the links offered on the first page. I mean, those must be the most relevant results, right?

Not necessarily – you see, most websites use search engine optimization, or SEO, to artificially boost the chance of their website coming up in the first few pages of search engine results. While on-site SEO is very important, the major difference comes from how you utilize off-site SEO.

Off-Site SEO Basics

Essentially, the main thing you want with your off-site SEO is inbound links (also known as backlinks). Inbound links are hyperlinks that point back to your website from another domain. The favorite term in the industry for the effect of these links is “link juice.” The better the link, the more “juice” it sends your site. If a link is coming from a popular, well respected website, you’ll get more juice from that link. If the link is coming from a free blog that was set up a week ago, you’ll receive less juice.

For example, if the Huffington Post links back to your website or one of your blog posts, you’re getting a very high quality link. Since most major sites like this won’t allow you to simply plaster links on their pages, you have to use different methods to bring in those high quality inbound links.

Tips For Getting More Links

Posting good content is without a doubt the number one way to bring in links. The better your content is, the more likely it is to be shared by your viewers. Other blogs will take notice and begin posting links back to your website. This method has a slow start, but is ultimately the most powerful and effective. Think of it like a snowball rolling down a mountain; by the time it gets to the bottom it’s an avalanche.

Of course, to speed that up a little you can always write guest posts for other blogs and websites. This is a mutually beneficial arrangement because you can put a link in the post back to your website, and the other site gets free content. Everybody comes out ahead.

Simultaneously, you should always submit your site (or blog) to search directories. There are hundreds out there, and it only takes a minute to do. Technorati is a great directory for business blogs, but there are plenty of others as well.

Everybody knows that it’s vital these days for a business to have a website. Developing a strong online presence is important for any type of business or enterprise in any industry. Despite this, it’s surprising to find out that a lot of small businesses still haven’t made the leap to the online world. It’s actually estimated that as many as 40% of small businesses are operating without a website.

The truth is, no matter what your market niche may be, a website offers a valuable window for new customers. It’s not enough to just set up a social media profile, such as a Facebook fan page, and call it quits. As we edge further into 2012, it’s more vital than ever that you build a virtual storefront for your business.

Of course, simply setting up a website isn’t the end of the road either. Even among the businesses that do have a website, there are plenty of people who haven’t set it up to optimize their online endeavors. What I mean is, you may have a website already, but if you haven’t engaged in the right type of promotion you’re probably looking at meager traffic statistics. The goal behind setting up a website in the first place is that it will ideally become a powerful inbound marketing opportunity for you business.

A quick look at the internet in 2012 shows it to be much different than the way it was in 2003 or 2004. Back then, just having a website was sometimes all you needed. These days, the success of a company website depends on its surrounding network of connections. You need to make use of search algorithms, strong blogging techniques, engaging content and social media interaction in order to bring your website to the largest possible audience.

The reason the online arena has changed so drastically is because the behavior of the buyers has changed. Most customers now want to have the freedom to choose – they need to choose how, when, and where they make a purchase, all without a pushy salesperson badgering them to get on with it. This shift in psychology basically means that a customer wants to be given information during their online experience, not have it shoved down their throats. It’s a self-service community.

Interactive content – blog posts, social media, podcasts – now make up the majority of all online sales, showing that inbound marketing is on the rise while outbound sales – direct mailers, telemarketing – are on the decline both in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. The bottom line is that a virtual storefront set up for inbound marketing is cheaper, easier, and more cost effective than any of the sales gimmicks that used to be so popular. Your website will form the front line for leads, sales, and increased conversions.

As anyone will tell you, setting up a business blog is an important aspect of developing an online presence for small businesses. Blogs create a steady stream of traffic and fresh material for both search engines and human visitors alike, and with proper SEO techniques they can be a powerful way to boost a website’s PageRank.

However, simply putting up a blog under your company’s name doesn’t take you all the way. A lot of businesses these days hear about the importance of blogs and jump on the bandwagon without figuring out how to properly integrate the blog with their website, and as a result they lose out on a lot of the potential traffic that would usually come from those blogs. An example of this would be publishing your blog on an entirely separate domain from your main website. Some companies even try to cut budgeting corners and publish their blogs on one of the many free blogging platforms peppering the internet. Taking either of these routes is a crippling mistake that will put a damper on the effectiveness of your blog.

Aside from the obvious SEO complications, your brand itself will also suffer. When a customer or visitor on your website clicks on a link to go to your blog, most of the time they’ll expect to stay on the same domain. When that link takes them to a different domain, or worse, to wordpress.com or blogger.com, they might get confused because of the unexpected transition. If they land on a free blogging platform, they may even see your brand as unprofessional because you aren’t even willing to pay a few extra dollars a month to host your own content. There’s a lot to be said about the reliability of a site that hosts their own blog, even if it’s only a face value perception.

There are three simple ways that you can keep your blog integrated with your website to fully enjoy the benefits it has to offer.

Host Your Blog on a Sub Domain

The best place to put your blog is on a sub domain adjacent to your own site. For example, if your website is www.mysite.com, the blog sub domain would appear as www.blog.mysite.com. This keeps everybody in the same place, and allows you to perform off-site SEO for a single site as opposed to two.

Host Your Blog in a Website Folder

Alternatively, you could place the blog location in a folder on your website, with the end result appearing as www.mysite.com/blog. From the user’s perspective, this is identical to the effect created by a sub domain.

Use a Similar Domain

Finally, if you really want to set up a separate domain for your blog, it helps to keep the URL as similar as possible. Using the same example, this might look like www.mysiteblog.com. You will run into the problem of setting up viable SEO for both of these sites, but you get the added benefit of having two domains, which can be used to link with each other, thus increasing your backlink power.

One of the main reasons that people come to blogs is to get free information, sometimes entertainment if the blog is set up to provide it. When they stumble across a blog that provides a wealth of useful information, they are much more likely to come back to that blog sometime in the future, bookmark it, share it with friends, and basically spread the word about it. On the other hand, if the blog is obviously marketing their own products with every single blog post, they have a hard time feeling secure when it comes to trusting that information. It’s obviously biased, so they would rather just get the information from a source they can trust.

The way to fix this is to add in some extra variety in your blog posts. Rather than taking a product-centric stance on your blogging, search for ways to provide reliable, educational content that people can use – even if they don’t purchase one of your products. Make it a mix between the purely educational, thought provoking opinions, and data offerings to give your visitors enough variety to keep coming back for more.

What will happen as you do this is that your blog will eventually be seen as an authority on your niche market. Since people have the tendency to share information that has helped them, you’ll be able to reach out to a wider audience, in the meantime bringing in more potential customers. Your visitors will begin to associate your website with useful advice and valuable market expertise, which will in turn boost your credibility and give people trust in any products that you offer elsewhere on the site.

To put it simply, your goal with your business blog should be to become a thought leader in your particular industry. When a new industry breakthrough hits the airwaves, your blog will be the first place people turn to, to get the reliable facts. You can do this in several ways, the easiest of which is to simply post informative content based on your own experiences. For example, if you run a gardening supply website, post guides for planting during different seasons. If you have a law firm, put out some recent case studies or factual data, or publish pieces of interest on recent cases that fall under your area of expertise.

The key is to mix it up and take the main focus of your blog off your particular products or services. The more you are able to do that, the more you’ll begin to see that you don’t need to constantly plug your products to keep up the sales volume.