Content Marketing Today

Why Integrating Your Blog with Your Homepage Is Vital to Your Content Marketing Strategy and to Google SEO

It’s All about the Maximizing the Frequency of Critical Keywords on Your Homepage

I have believed that integrating the two content marketing components was important since the very beginning of my own online efforts. 

Of course, your content marketing strategy relies on providing relevant, compelling, and frequently updated information that targets your best customers. By integrating a blog into the homepage of your website, you have the opportunity to do exactly that. You can write lots of articles and organize them in a logical way so that your visitors can find exactly what they need quickly.

But, until last week, I seriously underestimated why the integration of those two is so very important to getting found by Google and by your prospects. And, after all, getting found is what makes great content valuable to you and your organization.

Findability Flows Naturally from Homepage/Blog Integration

Because Google sees things somewhat differently than your visitors, your blog posts give you the opportunity to fill your homepage with keywords that make it easy for Google—and, therefore, for visitors to find you.

Why is that?

When you integrate your blog posts with your homepage, you can effectively repeat an astonishingly large number of keywords in a way that seems completely natural both to Google and to your prospective customers.  Moreover, you do not create an egregiously high keyword density that would put search engines on alert for phony, duplicative content.

A standard homepage–even one optimized for search engines–contains primarily static content of a finite length. You can cram only so many keywords and phrases onto that homepage. If you over stuff the page with keywords, you offend both Google and your visitors.

But, as soon as you integrate a substantial number of blog posts into the homepage you have multiple opportunities to showcase the keywords that are most important in search engine optimization.

This insight hit me over the head while I was testing out some new tools using my website as a guinea pig. I tested by searching for the phrase, "content marketing."

On my site, "content marketing" is the overwhelmingly most important keyword phrase that defines what I do to solve my customers problems.  Unless those two words appear frequently, neither Google nor customers will find me.  On the other hand, I would not want to overdo their use.

ContentMarketingToday.com as SEO Test bed

As many of you may know, you can discover how Google sees your site by doing a test search and then looking at the cached version of the page which highlights the key word or phrase that brought Google to your website. Thus, I used "content marketing" to experiment with my site.

I was astonished to see that on my homepage that phrase came up 33 times– and the word content and the word marketing added to the search impact even when they were used separately.

The slice of my homepage below gives you a pretty good idea of keyword frequency:

As I scrolled down the entire homepage, all those yellow highlighted words and phrases really popped out. It became obvious that by integrating my blog with my homepage, "content marketing" naturally occurred very often, but in an entirely natural way.

Remember that your visitors may not scroll all the way down the page, but Google does. Thus, you benefit from all of those keyword instances.  This becomes even more important if you have 3,4, 5 or more essential keywords. You can include each of them with adequate frequency to make an significant SEO difference.

Google likes that integration and your customers will like it, too.

Below, you can compare the typical opportunities to include keywords on a standard homepage and on a homepage that integrates a blog. The added value of the latter becomes pretty obvious when you itemize all the extra opportunities.

Where to put keywords on a standard homepage:

• in the website header
• in the main navigation
• in the headline and subheads of the core homepage content
• in the core homepage content
• in an Seo friendly footer

Within integrated homepage and blog–all of the above and these additional locations:

• in the headline and subhead of each blog post—as an example, that includes 10 articles on my website
• in the body copy of each blog post
• in the categories by which all blog posts are organized
• in a widget that shows most recent posts
• in a widget that shows most popular posts
• in a widget that shows comments on posts

The Content Marketing Keyword Bottom-Line

You must have great content to succeed online. But that’s just the beginning. 

You must be easily findable when Google and your prospects are searching for the keywords that represent information that is most important to them.

By integrating your blog into your homepage, you dramatically increase the number of keywords that you can comfortably include in your content.  In so doing, you simultaneously maximize the probability of outstanding Google search results.