A blog of some form is an integral component to nearly any website these days.
Your blog is your chance to convince your readers that you are an expert in your field and worth following. However, if you optimize blog content for SEO purposes, then you can stand to benefit even more.
Are you unsure where to start? Consider implementing these SEO blog post tips into your broader strategy to gain more readers and develop a loyal following.
Can Blogging Actually Help Your SEO?
You may have read plenty of SEO blog post tips in the past, but you might have also been dubious about whether or not blogging can have any SEO benefits. The simple truth is that it does and in more than one way.
Blog content helps your website stay current with fresh information. Search engines are always looking for a great user experience to deliver to their customers, and when they can point them in the direction of timely information, those websites get rewarded with people staying on their pages longer. Always keep the human value and experience in mind when creating your content. No tip matters more than this!
Another SEO benefit of blogging is how you can target specific long-tail keywords. Even if you started off with a focus on shorter, relevant keywords, you’ll eventually run out of this or find them very crowded. Longer tail keywords have less competition but require more content to address. Blog posts are perfect for this. Once you start looking for long tails and even shoulder keywords, you’ll find more of them than you think possible. It’s a great way to find low-competition corners of your niche and also come up with quite a few ideas about future blog posts.
You can also use blogging to build up your internal linking. Google’s spiders and algorithm look at internal links in order to discover, classify, and position content properly. You can make life easy for them and yourself in the process. At the very least, you’ll keep your website more organized.
Great blog content also increases your chances of getting external links pointing back to your own site. This is one of the hardest aspects of all SEO, but it’s also one of the most powerful ways to increase your search engine results page SERP. It is still more a matter of quality than quantity, but anytime someone shares a blog post of yours on social media, that’s a backlink. Some estimates suggest a quarter of all Internet traffic goes through Facebook posts and messages, so don’t overlook it.
Perhaps the biggest advantage is being able to use focus keywords to truly connect to your audience. They can find a thousand websites trying to sell them something or get them to subscribe to a mailing list. However, when your blog delivers actual value to them, you earn their trust, which is worth so much more.
# SEO Tips to Optimize Your Blog Posts
As much as one of your readers can find 100 websites that might sell what they need, you can just as easily find the same number of tips to squeeze SEO benefits out of your blog. Keep it simple by starting with the following suggestions:
Optimize Your Blog Posts
Strike a balance here. Google prefers longer articles, but anything too long might scare human readers away. Aim for a minimum word count of 300 words, but test the ceiling with several human test readers.
Include Images and Video Content
Engaging content ranks higher, and content with videos and images are certainly more engaging than simple text. Just be sure you have text breaking up the pictures and videos. Also, include alt text descriptions of your images and videos.
Organize Content Around Topic Clusters
If you find yourself keyword stuffing in any particular blog post, you might actually have multiple posts or articles you need to do. Find the central topic bringing everything together, and then use it as a ‘trunk’ from where you can branch out pieces focused on closely related keywords.
Constantly Focus on Evergreen Content
You need to create evergreen content and then publish it, but you also need to keep doing it. Never let your blog get or stay static. Steady development of your content will mean steady traffic, and you might just wind up with one of those cherished featured snippets.
Spruce Up Older Content
Evergreen content is such a huge ranking factor that it’s not enough to keep churning out new content. You need to be constantly updating existing content or even removing content that is outdated. Whenever possible, repurpose older content to increase its useful lifespan.
Use Specific Keywords
Ideally, each piece of content will focus on a specific keyword, but there are almost always other keywords you can include in the content. Try putting them in the title, introductory sentence, headings, subheadings, and final paragraph. No one, bot or human, should have any trouble knowing what you’re writing about. Also, never neglect your meta description.
Be Sure Your Blog Is Responsive
When indexing results for its search engine results pages, Google applies a mobile-first methodology. That means that even when someone searches from a desktop, it’s the responsiveness of your mobile site that makes an impression. Make sure your mobile site loads easily and quickly. If you don’t yet have a mobile version of your site, then you are behind on your search engine optimization as it is.
In Conclusion
Whatever your motivations are for running a website, you have to take certain steps to ensure its success. Gaining followers and their trust can lead to getting them to perform the actions you need from them, be it sales or subscriptions.
Use these tips to optimize blog content for human readers and search engines alike. You’ll generate traffic and loyalty like never before.
