Blogging is a great way to build your brand, establish yourself as a thought leader and also earn some brownie points when it comes to search engine results. If you have just started blogging or are considering building your own MSP blog, then here are 5 tips that will help make your blog posts search engine friendly.

Use keywords in the title: Make sure your blog’s title makes use of ‘keywords’—words you know your leads/customers will use to find you/your line of business online. Examples include: Managed services, cloud services, MSP, etc. This is very important, since each blog post actually has a URL of its own and using the keywords in the title allows it to be a part of that URL—which, by the way is scanned by search engines.

Use heading styles: Using heading style tags for the section/sub-heads of the blog post is a great idea as this attracts search engine attention. Don’t forget to use keywords in your headings, though.

Hyperlink: Use the keywords in your content and hyperlink them back to your website—this will help boost your web traffic. For example, in a blog about the benefits of cloud storage, you could link the term cloud storage to the cloud storage service offering section of your website.

Tags: Blogs allow you to provide ‘tags’ for your blog posts–meaning words you can associate your post with. These tags function like keywords for that particular post. You should be giving relevant tags to your posts so it becomes easier for search engines to find you.

Share: Don’t forget to share your blog posts on social media sites such as Facebook/twitter/LinkedIn. The greater the number of people visiting your blog, the better your chances of showing up in search engine results.

Finally, remember, your blog is for people—so make sure your content is easy to understand and interesting. Because while topping search engine results might get you visitors at the end of the day, it is the content that helps you get loyal followers.