The beauty of having a business blog associated with your website is that it can rank in the search engines right along with your company’s main website and social profiles. In fact, individual blog posts can rank extremely well for long-tail keywords, if set up properly. Your business blog, when combined with all of your company’s other online real estate, will help build your brand.

In order to make this a reality, of course, your entire business blog, as well as every post, needs to be properly optimized the same way every page of your website is optimized.

Here are three ways to make your business blog more search engine friendly:

1. Optimize each and every post. It is important to make sure that your blog posts rank well for related searches. In order for it to rank well, each individual blog post needs to be optimized the same way you would each page of your company’s website.

Try writing your post first and then revisit it to see if you can naturally fit more targeted keywords into the content. In addition to making sure there are keywords in the body of the post, you should also try to work keywords into the URL structure and H1 or H2 tags.

The key to optimizing your blog posts is to make sure that they read naturally. If a keyword doesn’t sound right in a particular sentence, don’t force it. There is nothing more annoying to readers than content that is “stuffed” with keywords. Without readers, your rank means nothing.

1. 2. Link related posts and pages. Once a reader has made it to your blog, the idea is to keep them around for as long as possible. One way to do so is to create an easy-to-follow linking structure. This will help you to link posts together and also link them to other relevant pages that you own and provide the reader with more in-depth information.

With a good internal linking structure you can show your audience that you are an industry expert, encouraging them to delve deeper into your blog. Links are a great way to drive blog traffic to your website, but don’t incorporate too many links. A few useful links are enough to keep users interested without overwhelming them.

1. Use unique Meta descriptions. Many website owners don’t take advantage of Meta descriptions. Although they are not as important to search engines as they once were, that doesn’t mean they can’t help.

Meta descriptions are actually like little advertisements in the search engine results pages. Use 150 characters to help convince a searcher to choose your blog post over every other listing.

After you write your blog post, come up with a quick optimized meta description that will help that post stand out.

When it comes to small business websites, web copy should be influenced but not led by SEO keywords.

As part of any search engine optimization (SEO) campaign, targeted keywords need to be incorporated into the copy on respective landing pages. This will help the major search engines distinguish the unique relevance between each page. However, if the web page copy doesn’t make sense, grammatically, prospective clients will go elsewhere.

SEO is vital to any online marketing strategy and is typically a website’s main source of lead generation. While there are many tactics involved in a running a successful SEO campaign, such as incorporating keywords into URLs, headers and meta information, one of the most important tactics is integrating targeted keywords into the site’s copy without sacrificing key messages and grammar.

Re-writing website copy can be the most complicated step in an SEO campaign. Keywords should be used throughout the copy, using the appropriate density, but without harm to the copy’s message. The final copy should make sense because if it doesn’t, even a strong search engine position will be worthless.

SEO campaigns need both time and investment to be successful, but the return on investment can be huge. By not taking the extra time to ensure that keywords are being used properly, you will be setting yourself up for failure.

Twitter recently announced that it is redesigning its popular social networking website, with changes scheduled to be rolled out over the next few weeks.

Now featuring four new tabs, Twitter says that it has created a new streamlined, user-friendly way to stay connected online.

Here’s the skinny:

Home Tab

Just like the default page that all Twitter users are used to, the home tab features a constant feed of tweets by the people you are following. The difference lies in the fact that images, videos and conversations are now embedded within the feed, giving users a more comprehensive view of current stories.

Connect Tab

The connect tab allows users to see how others are interacting with them. This section allows you to see who is following you, mentioning you, retweeting your post or adding them to their favorites.

Discover Tab

This customized tab shows all news and trends as they relate to your interests. The discover tab will automatically pull up news related to not only who you follow, but to your location as well. Of course, you can also customize your own news feeds by searching a #hashtag to see related posts and tweets about that particular subject.

Me Tab

The “me” tab allows users to introduce themselves to the Twitter community. The new streamlined look incorporates a user’s bio, photo, interests and a feed of the users recent tweets. The tab also shows direct messages, so you can keep the conversations going.

Tweet Tab

The Tweet tab makes it easier than ever to share your thoughts with the Twitter community. Users can send tweets instantly from any location on Twitter and now users can tag their location or upload images and videos directly from their device. In addition, a new “auto-complete” feature pulls up a list of people you follow when you want to @mention someone.

Although it may be a few weeks before the redesign is available to all users, sneak previews are currently available through mobile apps for the iPhone and Android.

The way that small business website owners use YouTube as part of their overall marketing campaign has been changing rapidly over the past few years. In fact, the constant changes to YouTube and its consistent additions of new features seem to be growing in frequency.

The most obvious changes have been made to basic items like its video watch page and the algorithm used to create search recommendations. The algorithm, for example, now factors in freshness, so that recent videos now have an edge over old favorites.

Advertising on YouTube has also changed dramatically. The TrueView system, which charges advertisers when their ads are watched in their entirety, wasn’t even around two years ago.

Another fairly recent feature, are the browser-based apps that can be used for editing videos or adding effects within the YouTube Create section. These days, you can make videos without a camera. The GoAnimate tool, for example, creates animated videos based on your script.

Now, YouTube has introduced its own analytics feature, providing deeper viewer insight than ever before.

So, with all of these changes and many expected to come, how can a small business website owner harness the power of YouTube for online marketing?

1. Find someone who can point, shoot and edit. It wasn’t that long ago that you had to hire professional videographers to record your message. However, the bar has now been lowered and all a small company really needs is someone who can work a camera and do a little editing. In fact, cameras built into smartphones and tablets are often good enough. If you want to hire a semi-pro model or actor, you can now get one for less than $500, bringing overall costs down substantially.

2. Grab your viewer’s attention quickly. People watch online videos differently than they watch television. Just like a website, an online video needs to grab a user’s attention within the first 15 seconds.

3. Optimize your video content. Because there are roughly 48 hours of new video content uploaded to YouTube every minute, you need to stand out in the crowd. This means that uploading your content just isn’t enough. Research what keywords will get you the most viewers and use those words in your titles, tags, and descriptions.

4. Spread the word. YouTube is popular because it makes sharing and embedding easy. Let everyone know when you have posted a new video and encourage them to share it, like it and repost it.

5. Utilize the YouTube analytics feature. If you don’t study the free analytics tools that YouTube offers, you are missing out on a valuable resource. Learn where your viewers are located, which blogs are giving you the most referrals, and where people stopped watching your videos and why. This kind of research can help make your next videos even better than before.