Business blogs are primarily set up to increase search engine traffic to an organization’s website. However, merely creating content and expecting readers to flock in by the dozens to read it is not the soundest business strategy. It is not uncommon for a company blog to sit silent after thousands of dollars and dozens of posts. Unread posts waste a lot of time and money.
For a blog post to work and be shared by readers, there are multiple things you need to get right. An important one being SEO optimization. In this post, we share 7 tips on how you can optimize your blog posts for SEO.
1. Research Your Keywords Before Planning Your Content
Beginners often choose topics that they feel their users will find interesting based on their best guesses.
Blind guesses are not necessary, especially when keyword research can help you to identify what your users are searching for.
Researching keywords is a technique used by SEO experts and content creators. Based on search engine data, it allows you to determine what your users are interested in. Based on your keyword research, you can then plan the content for your website. You’ll be able to find lots of blog post ideas this way, and you’ll ensure that you write about topics people are actually interested in.
SEMRush is a good tool for keyword research. You can analyze keywords in detail, compare competitions, track keyword positions, and more with such tools.
2. Determine Semantic Keywords Based On Your Focus Keyword
You need to pick a keyword that has the highest search volume and the lowest level of competition following your keyword research. Your focus keyword will be this. Your users will probably search for this keyword most often.
Following that, you need to figure out what keywords are LSI (Latent Semantic Index) keywords. Search for the focus keyword in Google Search and scroll down the results to find them. They will appear as related searches. Make your content as complete as possible by including as many of these keywords as possible.
Avoid stuffing them into your content at all costs. You would appear odd to your users and search engines can detect keyword stuffing pretty well.
3. Pick An Effective Title
Make your page title engaging. When you publish your article, it will appear at the top of the browser window and SERPs. The title itself will either put your readers off or catch their interest.
For help writing a better page title, follow these guidelines:
- Keep it brief: For mobile searches, the first 50-60 characters will be shown before they are truncated.
- Provide accurate information: Make sure the title of the page accurately describes the content. Describe the information you will provide by using words such as “how,” “what,” and “why,” and include solid descriptors.
- Be original: It may be tempting to reuse the same title tag for every page of your website, but it isn’t good for your search engine rankings or audience. Instead, give each page its own title.
4. Develop A Habit Of Internal Linking
If you blog for some time, you will have accumulated enough content for users to read. You can encourage new readers to read your older posts by internal linking.
Linking your old and new posts is a great way to build contextual connections between them. Internal linking makes sure that your on-page SEO is good and that your older articles continue to get new links. Beginning bloggers often make the mistake of doing only one-way internal linking by linking to older posts from their new posts. Putting links to your new articles in older posts can also be a great benefit, so you should also do that.
5. Your Blog Post Should Have A Meta Description
You can add a meta description to any page in HTML. A short description will give search engines and other crawlers a brief overview of your article. According to some SEO experts, meta descriptions are no longer relevant. Others, however, disagree. We recommend all of your posts use a meta description.
The meta description of an article can provide a lot of useful information. Social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn display it as well when someone shares your articles on their platforms. Now that you know that people are going to read your meta descriptions, you want them to be as helpful as possible. In order to promote your website, ensure that the meta description contains at least one mention of your focus keyword. Meta descriptions can be up to 155 characters. Make sure you do not exceed 155 characters on your meta description. Additionally, try using the focus keyword early on in the meta description.
6. Improve The Readability Of Your Articles
Search engines consider readability when ranking pages. It is often common for articles that are easy to read to rank higher than those that are difficult to read. Mobile and computer screens aren’t always the best platform for reading. Many people just skim articles on these platforms. The average user spends less than a second deciding whether to stay on a page or leave it. You have only a few seconds to persuade the user to stay and scroll. It will be easier for your users to quickly scan your content if the article is more readable.
You can make your writing more readable by using short sentences, smaller paragraphs, punctuation, headings, and bullet points. Do ensure that you optimize your content for mobile sites as well since a high majority of readers tend to browse the net on their mobile devices.
7. Write Comprehensive Blog Posts
Articles that cover topics in great detail are highly favored by search engines. In your content planning process, we asked that you obtain semantically related keywords (LSI keywords). You can use these related keywords to determine the types of searches users conduct relating to the topic. You can make your article more informative, useful, and comprehensive if you include those keywords. If possible, split up the text into headings and subheadings with tags and include those keywords within them.
You can also use Image Search in addition to LSI keywords to create complete content. Topic bubbles will appear with various keywords within them. Whenever you create content, it is recommended that you include these, so your content is as comprehensive as possible.
Conclusion
A few SEO tricks used to be enough to make your website rank well in Google, but those days are long gone. Today, it’s all about the content. Content that’s well crafted also leads to more linking, sharing, tweeting, and repeat visitors to your site. In addition to these suggestions, there are always other things you can do to make sure your post is SEO friendly, but the most important thing is to write content that is informative and engaging!
