You may already be aware of the importance of business blogging. However, you may not be very clear as to how you can optimize your blog posts and make them search engine friendly. Without search engine optimization (SEO), you cannot expect to take full advantage of the tremendous marketing potential that blogging can provide. A study conducted by blogger.com showed that approximately 60 percent of the businesses have blogs, but 65 percent of the blog owners do not even update their blogs. The aim of this article is to provide some tips on how you can optimize a blog post for SEO so that you are in a position to enjoy the benefits that blogging offers.
8 Tips On How To Properly Do Blog SEO
1: Do extensive keyword research
For proper on-page optimization, thorough keyword research is essential. You may naturally include keywords when you provide valuable content on various topics on your website. However, it is important to make use of certain techniques and tools in order to identify related keywords that you may have not considered but are relevant to your blog. You can make use of semrush and Google Adwords keyword tool to find out related keywords depending on the topics covered in your blog posts. You can also use these tools to find out what keywords or keyword phrases your competitors are targeting in order to generate traffic for their websites.
2: Sprinkle keywords throughout your blog post
After identifying the keywords that are relevant to the topic of your blog post through research using the tools, the next step is placing them strategically to create maximum impact. This is important because search engine crawlers index the content on the basis of relevance and keywords usage. Include keywords in the title, title tags, headings/subheadings, first paragraph in the introductory sentence, last paragraph, anchor text and meta descriptions. However, you must take utmost care to avoid keyword stuffing as it can irritate readers. In addition, Google can penalize you for keyword stuffing. The trick is to strategically place them at a couple of locations.
3: Optimize images
You must include the keywords in the filename of the photos that you add to your blog. Additionally, you should also include a keyword-rich description in the alternate text field.
4: Reference other blogs/bloggers with links
backlinks.2Sometimes, you may refer to another article or blogger in your post. If you do that, it is important that you incorporate a link to the referred article or blogger. It is good blogging etiquette. In addition, you may receive a link back to your blog, if you are lucky. Quality links are helpful in improving your SEO ranking.
5: Give visitors an opportunity to subscribe
Place Feed/RSS subscription button at a prominent place on your site so that readers can easily subscribe to receive your blogs through email. This enables your followers to receive instant notification when you post new blogs.
6: Make use of social media platforms to expand your reach
You may already be using Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc., in order to create new connections for your business and engage with your current customers. It is a good idea to promote your blogs also through these sites. This will help to increase your web exposure. You can easily post the links to your blogs on several social media platforms with a couple of clicks by using free programs such as Hootsuite.
7: Write good blog posts
It is very important that your blog post remains relevant and well laid out. Many bloggers just write whatever comes to their minds. If you are a natural writer, then it may be easy for you to write good articles. However, it is a good idea to keep the following aspects in mind when creating a blog post.
- What is it that you want to convey to the readers through your text? What is the reason for creating the blog post? What is it that you want the readers to do after they finish reading your blog? It is a good idea to write down your answers to the questions prior to writing a blog.
- Decide the structure of the blog post. Your article should definitely have an introduction, a body and a conclusion.
- If you want to convey more than one idea, segregate the body of your article into different paragraphs. Convey only one idea through a praragraph.
- Use headings to help people find their way through your article. Subheadings help to lead people. It also helps them to scan your page and makes the structure clearer.
- Use signal words in order to make it easy for your readers to scan through your article and quickly grasp the main idea. For example, if there are three reasons as to why you are selling a product, then the signal words you can use are: Firstly, Secondly and Finally. Words such as So, Therefore, Surely, Nevertheless and Indeed are also signal words that you can use in your blog posts. Signal words are important elements that enhance the structure of your text.
- Prior to publishing your blog, get someone to read it. This is to ensure that there are no typos and there is clarity as regards the main idea of the post.
8: Use WordPress SEO plugin
WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast helps you to create a blog post that is search engine friendly. This is because the plugin measures several text-related aspects as you write your article. The three important ones are as follows:
• It helps you to formulate your meta description.
• It calculates your article’s Flesch reading ease score. This provides an indication of the readability of the blog. For example, the score even takes into consideration the length of sentences.
• It checks whether you have included the keyword in 5 key locations such as the article title, page title, and URL, article content, and meta-description. In addition, it checks whether there are images and links in the blog. Further, it determines the word count and keyword density of the article.
If you can invest some time and incorporate the simple SEO tips explained in your articles, you are sure to enjoy higher rankings in search engine listings, increased web traffic, and better customer conversion rates.
Finally, here are a couple of links that will help you to have a better understanding of the aspects discussed in this article. One is a blog written by Jonathan Long on B2C http://www.business2community.com/blogging/6-blog-post-seo-tips-get-content-ranking- 0963109 and an article contributed to Yoast’s blogging site by Marieke van de Rakt https://yoast.com/seo-friendly-blog-post/
