Maintaining a blog as part of your website is an excellent way to keep your website content fresh, share useful information with clients (and potential clients!), and increase and maintain an excellent ranking in the search engines that crawl the web. In simplistic terms, a good SEO ranking means your website comes up at or near the top when people are looking for the services you (and your competitors) provide. Today, contributor Andrea Lythgoe, LCCE, shares how she easily keeps her website updated with new material by curating a weekly blog and also writing new content as well. The benefits to her business are measurable and really help! You can do it too! Andrea shares some quick and easy ideas for adding a blog to your business website and giving your business a boost! - Sharon Muza, Community Manager, Science & Sensibility

Many birth professionals want their website to rank well in search engines so they can be found by potential clients and students. When it comes to staying at the top of the search results, it is important to keep your site current. Essentially, the search engines assume that "If you're not updated, you are outdated" and a site that doesn't change hurts you in the rankings. The easiest way to keep your website current and fresh is to keep an updated blog on your site. The "on your site" part is important. For best SEO, your blog should be integrated into your web site, not a separate blog hosted elsewhere. Blogging on a different platform like Blogspot or WordPress.com is easy, but separating it from your main site does not give you the benefit of a blog that is an integral part of your site.

I find that having a blog also gives people a reason to come back and visit my site often or subscribe to receive my posts regularly, and this keeps me in their minds throughout their pregnancy. It helps me share my thoughts and personality in a way that connects with potential clients. My work can be shared in other venues and amplifies my voice and gets my information out in front of more potential students.

The hardest part of blogging by far is coming up with ideas. Over the years, I've gotten better at coming up with ideas and I can find inspiration in many places. Here are some examples of when the blogging muse has spoken to me:

• when I felt myself stepping up on my soap box
• when I found a common misconception
• when I wanted to react/respond to other things I had read
• sometimes I even found inspiration in a different area
• those rare times when I waxed philosophical

Occasionally I write an article because I am annoyed or angry about something. In these cases, I write it and save it in draft form, waiting at least a week before I look at it again. Often I find that I need to tone those types of articles down before publishing, but those posts tend to be the ones that resonate well with my readers. I find it best to write articles when I am feeling inspired and motivated. But because I'm not always inspired to write full articles, the bulk of my blogging is a weekly feature I call the "Wednesday Wrap Up".

I use this weekly feature to curate content - I'm reading lots of blogs, following birthy people on Pinterest, and have some useful Google Alerts that help me find and read articles anyway, so I started sharing some of the most interesting finds with my readers. I make sure that I am using links, not reposting full articles. Reposting articles is an ethical no-no, plus you can share more if you use a collection of links.

With each link, I add a little commentary. Just a sentence or two - adding some original words or thoughts instead of just a list of links helps add the original updated content that the search engines are looking for and reward. Having that weekly deadline helps me to make sure that my website has new content added regularly. . I aim for the weekly update plus two other articles each month. Some months I meet that, some months all I do is the weekly update. The weekly feature keeps me at the top of the search engine lists even when I don't feel inspired.

Whenever I post a Wednesday Wrap Up, I immediately start a draft of the new one. Any time I see a good article in my blog reader, my Pinterest feed, or shared to Facebook or Twitter, I add it to the draft. I try to add my commentary at the time I read the article, but sometimes I get lazy and just have a list of links to work from on Tuesday evening. I aim to have five to ten links to share each week. If I get ten links and it isn't Wednesday yet, I go ahead and schedule that post to run on Wednesday and start a new draft for the next Wednesday. At times I've been two or three weeks ahead, and at times I'm scrambling on Tuesday evening (or even Wednesday morning!) to find links to fill it. When I first started out, I shared a video each week as well, but I found that it took too much time to find and choose the links, and if not a public video, I needed to get permission to embed the video. Therefore, I recently simplified and now just share links.

Tips:

When blogging, ALWAYS include an image or graphic with each post. Pinterest is a huge way of reaching women of childbearing age on social media, and without a photo or graphic, your blogging won't be "pinnable" and cannot be shared. Make sure you stay on the right side of copyright law and make your own or use others with permission.

Articles you write don't have to be long, just long enough to make the point clearly. If you have a longer post, consider breaking it up into a series. Expert opinions vary, and the trend seems to be towards longer posts, but most sources say the ideal length for a blog post is between 500-1000 words. Use as few words as possible to make your point and don't pad a post to make it longer than necessary.

Find your voice - you can be casual or professional, but stick with it and be consistent. I choose to be very casual on my web site. I want to come across as someone they can sit down and have a nice visit with. I do not want to come off sounding distantly professional. The choice is yours; either approach can work well, just be very aware, conscious and consistent in using your voice.

Pay attention to proper spelling and grammar. Because I use a more casual voice on my blog, I will sometimes use words like "kinda" but I try hard to not have any spelling errors and to use apostrophes incorrectly, etc.

Blogging can be a rewarding way to keep yourself relevant and to increase your rankings in the search engines. It is a valuable tool that you can use to build your business and reach your target market. Start today by sitting down and brainstorming a list of topics. If you are inspired by this article and start blogging (or recommit to that blog that you have been neglecting) please post a link to your new post in the comments below!

About Andrea Lythgoe

Andrea Lythgoe

Andrea Lythgoe is a doula, hospital-based Lamaze childbirth educator, birth photographer, and former instructor at the Midwives College of Utah. She is the author of the website UnderstandingResearch.com where she aims to help those just beginning to read research to understand the language of research. Her interest in research started while attending the University of Utah, where she made ends meet by working on a large randomized controlled trial and earned a degree in community health. Andrea served on the Board of Directors for the Utah Doula Association for over 10 years. She lives and practices in the Salt Lake City, Utah area. Andrea can be reached through her website.

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