Engaging the audience and holding its attention matters quite a lot to make your business blog successful. Remember, quality content sans online visibility and lack of focused readership is going to be of little use. In this context, optimization plays an important role in planning and conceptualizing a blog.

Here are a few more practical tips for successful business blogging from the SEO perspective:

1. Apart from posting user friendly and timely content, adhering to ethical SEO practices is equally important.  From the point of view of SEO, finding the right keywords is very vital. If chosen and used judiciously, they help enhance the visibility and popularity of your blog posts and further improving search rankings.
2. Don’t create content without keywords that you are keen to rank for, but do not over-optimize your content to the point that it ends up alienating serious readers. A fine line exists here, so be objective and not overenthusiastic.
3. Stay on core topic, by maintaining your keyword focus. Try and get your key term as closest as possible to the top of the copy as you can. Ideally, place it in the title itself. Ensure it’s encompassed by an h1 tag! Follow it up by including important keywords in the first paragraph. Most search engines, as is known, read a copy top-to-bottom and left-to-right. Obviously, they place a greater emphasis on what they notice at the top of a webpage.
4. Avoid redundancy and repetition. Refrain from overusing keywords. Maintain keyword density ideally (the percentage of how often they appear in a page) at 2% – twice for every 100 words, but this is not a winning formula to SEO success. It’s just a norm to follow!
5. Make it a point to project and market your business blog. Automate syndication of your blog updates to your online social profiles by showing up the recent posts on your Facebook page, LinkedIn profile as well as Twitter stream.
6. Ask’s Blog, Technorati and Googlr Blog search can also be handy.  You may use Technorati and Del.isio.us so as to tag the content on your site. Submit posts to sitemaps, article directories, 9Rules or NewsNow as well as blog directories.
7. Quality content, attractive layout, neat navigation, good presentation add relevant images with each post will hold the user’s attention.  Stay away from any sort of plagiarism as this will dent the credibility of your website in terms of search popularity and relevancy.
8. Provide for proper links/ trackbacks. Promote social bookmarking after every post. It is advisable to enable plug-ins like WP-ContactForm, WP-Cache, Adsense Deluxe, Popularity Contest and Feedburner Feed Replacement. Syndicate your blog post content on domain specific content-sharing platforms.
9. Many popular blogs use networking platforms like Twitter to make it easy for users to comment and share their opinions. Also, responding to the reader feedback and contributing to the ongoing discussion to further involve your target audience holds the key when it comes to popularizing your blog.