Corporate blogging is a great Internet marketing technique for multiple reasons. Not only does a company blog give the search engines more content to index (growing your trust factor), a business blog can be instrumental in building your online brand. Blogs are inherently social in nature, which means they are also a great way to connect with current and potential customers. In short, a well-written blog can help all aspects of your web marketing campaign, including SEO.

Here are five simple ways to better optimize your business blog for SEO:

Write naturally

It may sound like a “duh!” thing to say, but you’d be amazed at how many blog posts out there are crammed with keywords and anchor text. It’s the number one rule of any content marketing campaign: you have to write for human readers, not search engines. There is nothing wrong with going after the top keyword in your title and using it occasionally in the post itself, but don’t stuff. Write the post first and then go back and see where you can naturally incorporate your chosen keywords. If they don’t fit or feel forced, just leave them out.

Develop an internal linking structure

Once a visitor has arrived to your blog, you want to give them a reason to stay and keep clicking through your site. This is where a good internal linking structure comes in handy. Link to related posts to keep your reader engaged; they’ve already shown they are interested in that topic. Make it easy for readers to jump from post to post by incorporating things like “Most Popular Blog Posts” or “Newest Posts” into the side navigation bar. Take advantage of that fact that it is your blog and link back to various product and service pages on your main website. This can help drive traffic back to your main site.

Make it shareable

Blogging and social media work well together. In order to help promote your content and develop natural links, make your blog posts easy to share. Aside from the Big 3 of social networking (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn), which are a must, you can also add share buttons that allow readers to email your post, submit it to social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, +1 it with the new Google social signal and more. You definitely want your readers to be able to sign up for an RSS feed. Readers want to share great content with their online communities; make it easy for them to do so.

Create unique URLs

The URL of your blog post doesn’t have to be (and shouldn’t be) the full title of the post. A shorter URL is much easier to remember and a lot more appealing than a random collection of numbers and letters. The URL is also a great place to target the most important keywords. For instance, the URL of this post could be shortened to exampleblogsite.com/optimize-business-blog-seo.

Open up the comments

Blogs are a great place to connect with customers, so let them do so! Closing your comments means shutting down communication between you and your audience. You don’t want to let every comment through (there are plenty of spammer out there looking to take advantage of unsuspecting blog owners), but you should allow real comments from real people through. The more dialogue there is on your blog, the better.

These are by no means the only things companies can do to their business blogs to better optimize them for SEO, but they are a good place to start. It’s important to remember that, even though a blog is not the same as a regular website, many of the same white hat SEO rules apply. A business blog is a powerful tool for any company, don’t let it go to waste.

About the Author

Nick Stamoulis is the Founder of Brick Marketing, a full-service SEO services firm based in Boston, MA. With over 12 years of B2B SEO industry experience, Nick Stamoulis shares his knowledge by posting daily SEO articles to his blog, the Search Engine Optimization Journal, and publishing the Brick Marketing SEO Newsletter that goes out to over 130,000 opt-in e-mail subscribers. You can contact Nick Stamoulis at 781-350-4365 or nick@brickmarketing.com.