An excellent method to improve your brand’s reputation in its industry and draw more visitors to your website is through blogging. However, it takes more than just good content to get customers to visit your blog. You need to make the most of your content with the rightsearch engine optimization (SEO) tactics. If you optimize each of your blog posts with the methods below, you will increase the visibility and reach of your blog.
- Keyword Research
All blog posts should have one main keyword. This is the subject of your blog post, and you can also use a few variations on it. Strong keywords are those that align with both the content in the blog post and your target audience’s purchasing intent. The most significant factor to remember about keywords is that they should be a natural part of your blog post.
As a rule of thumb, it’s always better to target long-tail keywords, which are longer, more specific search terms. There are two large advantages with these keywords. First is that people searching for long-tail keywords are often more ready to purchase something than those just searching for general information. Second, is that there’s usually less competition in the search results for long-tail keywords, making it easier to rank your blog post higher in the SERPs.
There are a number of useful tools that can help you in deciding the right keywords, such asSEMrush,Ahrefs, Google Keyword Planner andMoz Keyword Explorer. When contemplating a keyword, make sure you examine how many searches it is receiving per month, how competitive it is and if there are any competitors of yours with high-ranking pages for that term.
- Make Sure Keywords Are Used Throughout Your Post
When you’ve selected a target keyword, you will need to use it correctly to get the best results from an SEO perspective. Generally speaking, a good keyword density target, which is how much you use the keyword in the post, is around 1.5 to 2.5 percent. For example, if you write a 1,000-word article. You should have your target keyword in the article about 15 to 25 times.
This may sound difficult to do at first, however, there are actually a few obvious places you should include your target keyword. These places are the title, the page URL, headings and sub-headings, the meta tag, and the introductory sentence and concluding paragraph. Insert a few in through the body, as well.
It’s worth noting that the two most crucial places are the title and the URL. Try to keep your title to 65 characters or less as Google will cut off longer titles. If your title is longer than that, make sure to include your keyword at the start.
The trick here is to create reader-friendly content. Don’t sacrifice this just to slip the keyword in a couple of more times. You may end up getting a penalty from Google for keyword stuffing.
- Optimize The Meta Description
When website visitors scroll through the search results, the meta description is the text displayed underneath the title to your page that describes what the page is about. People can read this and decide if they will check out your content or not.
After the page title, the meta description is the second-biggest ranking factor, which makes it imperative to utilise your target keyword in it. What you write is also important here, because you will only get people to visit your website if the meta description is engaging them.
- Be Cautious with Topic Labels
Topic labels, also known as tags, are a way for bloggers to categorize their posts. Although these can better organize the content on your blog, they can also cause problems if you overdo it with them.
You’ll run into issues with your topic labels if you put too many on a post or if you have several similar tags. For example, if you write a post about blogging and tag it “blog,” “blog posts” and “blogging,” the search engines could punish you for using similar tags.
Generally, it is best to come up with a list of about 15 to 25 tags that fit your blog. When you write a post, choose up to three tags to use.
- Optimize Images
Images spice up your blog posts, which is why content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without relevant images, according to CMO Council. Large walls of text can turn off readers, and images break up the monotony. Of course, your images need to fit the content of the post to be effective.
When you put images in your posts, there’s a simple way to boost the post’s SEO. Put your target keyword in the alt text of the image, as that’s what search engine bots look at to determine the content of the image.
- Include External and Internal Links
If you’ve ever found yourself spending hours on Wikipedia jumping from page to page, then you know why you should put internal links in your blog posts. Some benefits of internal linking include increased page views, reduced bounce rate, and better crawling and indexing (it surfaces your other relevant and authoritative pages to search engines). These internal links must be natural and not forced.
It’s also good for SEO to add a couple of external links on each post. Your readers will appreciate being able to get more information or see your sources.
