Every marketer knows that crafting a solid SEO strategy can make or break the success of a blog. Blog posts are a great way to establish authority, build credibility, and increase audience engagement, but they’re not always easy to be optimized for SEO. As a beginner, you can quickly become overwhelmed by the number of factors you need to take into consideration to improve your blog’s SEO, but it doesn’t have to be this complicated. Here are a few simple and easy ways to optimize your blog for SEO.
Research Your Keywords
You may have always focused on the quality of content when writing your blog posts, but there’s a step you should do even before you start writing the content. This step is to research the keywords you incorporate into the blog post. Keywords are the words or phrases that internet users are most likely to use when searching for a business similar to yours on the search engine. By researching the most relevant and high-ranking keywords that your target audience is likely to use, you can use these keywords in your content. By doing so, you raise the odds of ending up on the users’ search engine result pages; in other words, you improve your SEO.
You don’t need to rely on wild guesses when it comes to keywords; there are various tools you can use to find relevant high-ranking keywords. Once you’ve listed these keywords down, it’s time to narrow them down to the ones that have low competition yet the highest search volume. Afterward, you’ll want to find the Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords; keywords that are often used in searches that are related to the keywords you’ve narrowed down. It’s also a good idea to find relevant long-tail keywords.
Plan Your Content around the Keywords
Writing content without any direction or purpose will do little to boost your website’s SEO, that’s why you need to research keywords first. With all these keywords listed down, you can then tailor the content around them. By using the keywords you’ve researched as the cornerstone of your content strategy, you’ll be sure to cater the content you’re creating to the interests of the people reading it – instead of relying on guesswork.
Use an Appealing Title
The titles of your blog posts are the first things that your readers will see. If the title is vague or unappealing, you can’t expect them to stay around long enough to evaluate the value provided in the content. From an SEO’s perspective, the more relative the title to the search query, the higher you’ll rank. While coming up with the title, try your best to include the focus keyword in its wording, but don’t stop there. The title needs, before anything else, to be catchy and comprehensive.
Build Your Linking Network
Once you’ve been in the blogging game long enough, you’ll have created enough content that’s worthy of being read. Since you’re getting new readers the more you post, it’s very possible that your new readers are unaware of your old posts. This is a great time to refer them to the old posts by building an internal network of links that connects all your blogs together.
In addition to internal linking, it’s crucial to build a strong backlinking profile. Backlinking describes the links that refer readers from other high-authority websites to your site, and it’s the backbone of any SEO strategy. The expert team at SEO Jet explains how backlinking can be easily done by anyone with basic SEO knowledge. Once you identify the keywords or phrases you want to hyperlink, otherwise known as anchor text, you can use backlinking software to supercharge your link building strategy.
Present Content in Different Formats
The written word is the easiest way to create content, but it also gets quite boring, quite quickly. Moreover, it can take you paragraphs to describe something you can easily convey in one picture. To avoid losing the interest of the audience you’ve worked so hard to grab, make sure to diversify your content in different formats. Add visually appealing pictures, embed videos, upload infographics; do everything you can to spice up your content. However, be careful not to use any copyrighted images without getting proper permission.
Do Some Backend Optimization
Speaking of images, make sure to add an ALT-text description to all your images. This description makes it easier for the search engines’ crawlers to recognize the elements of your images, which boosts your SEO efforts. The same thing works by adding meta descriptions to your blog posts. Meanwhile, you can use post creation tools to make sure your blog posts are responsive across different devices and mobile-friendly.
Organize Your Content
Organizing your content by using tags and categories will help you stay on top of your content strategy, but, most of all, it’s crucial for both the search engines and your readers. It’s common for beginners to confuse categories and tags, but it’s important to get them right. Categories are the major topics you often discuss in your posts, while tags refer to the topics covered in individual posts. On the other hand, the way you organize the blog post itself plays a big role in whether it ends up as a featured snippet or not. To raise your odds, be sure to organize your content into bullet points and use the right headings and subheadings in each point.
Write for Your Readers
Finally, the most important thing to keep in mind is that you’re writing for your readers. Always ask yourself if your readers will be interested in reading this blog post: is it informative? Does the information follow a logical sequence and get the message across? Is the content original, valuable, and engaging? After all, articles that are easier to read always rank higher on the search engine result pages.
There are a lot of things you can do to optimize your blog posts for the search engines. You don’t have to be an SEO expert to get started; making a few tweaks here and there will give you significant results. What you do need to do, though, is follow a strategic approach to creating and publishing your content.
