Blogs have become one of the most useful methods in getting more visitors to your website. This is quite beneficial most especially to companies and businesses that have online presence since it helps in getting more leads and potential customers.
But having a blog with a bunch of relevant articles doesn’t always mean you’ll succeed at your goal of getting more site visitors. It takes more than just skillfully writing with a specific style and tone that will appeal to your visitors since you’ll need to be found first on the search engine results pages by your target audience.
Appropriate for the search engines and appealing to human eyes are two of your main goals when it comes to optimizing your blogs posts. Your posts should be useful and informative to your visitors, while ethically written using the right keywords you want to be found for on the search engines.
If you’ve been thinking of how to optimize blogs for search engines, implementing these six SEO tips for blog posts can help your blog get noticed.
1. Do keyword research
Keyword research is necessary for on-page optimization. You’d want your potential visitors to easily find you using the right words or phrases, that’s why it’s essential to build content around them. Keyword research helps you see how much or how little volume a relevant keyword has and you can use that information in deciding which keyword will best help your blog in getting visitors over time.
Free and paid tools are available to do keyword research, but you can start with Google Keyword Planner which is totally free, as long as you have a Google AdWords account.
2. Use your keywords properly throughout your post
Scattering your keywords throughout your blog post is one way to ensure that people looking for information will have a way to find your business blog. However, there’s a proper way to do this in order to avoid keyword stuffing.
It’s always better to strategically use your keywords and limit their occurrence especially within the body of your posts. There’s no specific number of occurrences since every post will have a different word count. As a suggestion and to be on the safer side, having less than ten occurrences in a 500-word post is ideal.
Don’t forget to include your target keywords on the post’s title, headings, sub-headings, introduction, concluding paragraph, anchor text (interlinking to another page or post), and on your Meta description and title tag.
3. Optimize your photos/images
If you use relevant images to support your post, it’s best to optimize them as well. Make sure to include keywords in the file names and alt text field so people searching for certain information will be able to find your images if they decide to search for related images.
4. Reference your (credible) resources with links
When you use a piece of info or if you mention another blog or post, it’s common practice and good blogging etiquette to link right to the source. It’s also possible to receive a link bank, so it’s only appropriate to choose credible resources to link to. A link back, also called external link, may be able to pass on ‘link juice’ to your own site and search engines consider this as a third-party vote.
5. Write long, useful, quality posts
In the earlier days, long posts are often generic and more commonly used by those who love to re-hash and re-write content for their own SEO purposes. But since Google’s algorithm is ever-changing and thin and poorly written content are surefire ways to get your site penalized, it’s normal to find more and more business blogs that have longer, quality content. In-depth blog posts with much-needed information are more common these days because website owners have learned the value of usefulness versus word count.
However, there is no rule that dictates the exact number of words that each and every blogger should adhere to. It will depend on the topic, niche, writing style, and type of audience to come up with an ideal length of blog posts that will deliver value to the target readers.
6. Use sub-headings
Separating relevant ideas within a post can be done by using sub-headings. It’s also a way to optimize the post since sub-headings can contain the target keywords or the long-tail keywords that support the topic.
There are still other ways on how to optimize blog for search engines and these are just a few of the SEO tips for blog posts which you can easily implement today. If properly implemented, over time, you will gain more visitors to your blog and have other pages on your website benefit from the traffic as well.
