People generally tend not to associate blogs with Internet marketing, but the two are inseparable. Web content is, after all, the king of SEO marketing. They allow users to weave more and more keywords into their site, and help a site to accrue more pages for indexing, which both lead to higher search engine rankings.

Here are a few tips to help you improve your SEO techniques and create effective, quality blogs.

1. Know Your Keywords.

Keyword research is the process of discovering what keywords your customers are actually typing in to search engines to find your site. You first want to brainstorm some possible keywords for your business. For example, if you owned a pizzeria, some keywords might be “best pizza,” pizza place,” or “fastest delivery.” Then, determine those keywords popularity and competition score by using a tool like Google Insights. Then, expand your research to discover new, related keywords you can compete for.

2. Brainstorm Some Keyword-Rich Topics.

Now that you’ve got your keywords, it’s time to generate some good blog topics. It’s not enough to take one keyword to focus on and pound out some SEO content. If you do, you’ll find yourself writing the same content reworded differently over and over again.

You can generate ideas for your SEO blog by incorporating a list style to some benefits or advantages of your company, or provide in-depth answers to customer questions. You can also use ancillary topics that aren’t directly related to your business, but could work. For example, a moving company might blog about how to make new friends in a new city. While the article isn’t directly about moving, the company is still able to use keywords like “movers,” “moving company,” or “moving services” no problem.

3. Write Well.

Good writing is clear, precise, and engaging. The problem is that you have to somehow work your keywords in X amount of times. While it’s important to strike a good balance between writing for human audiences and writing for robots, your priority needs to be on the humans. Many search engines like Google are penalizing sites for low-quality content that’s written purely to cheat their algorithms. Plus, your customers are already your primary concern, so your blogs should be written primarily as a way to help them. While you can’t completely forget about SEO when writing, you should focus on crafting content that provides valuable information to the end user–your potential customers.

Blogging is indeed one of the best SEO tools around today. If you have any questions about SEO blogging, feel free to ask in the comments. Read more.