If you have a blog, chances are you already understand the importance of business blogging. But do you know how to optimize your blog posts to make them more search engine friendly?
The truth is, many bloggers fail to take advantage of the enormous marketing potential of their blogs. In fact, a recent study by blogger.com shows that although roughly 60% of businesses have blogs, 65% of those blog owners haven’t even updated in the past year! By providing fresh, relevant content and performing basic blog post optimization, you can take advantage of the many benefits blogging offers.
Here are six easy search engine optimization (SEO) tips to help get your blog noticed.
1. Look For That Winning Keyword
Keyword research should be the very first step in developing a strategy for your SEO. It will help you determine the specific topics which your target audience is interested in and the search terms you want to be using.
It will be a smart move on your part to have at least one to two primary keywords in mind for every blog post, as well as some related or similar secondary keywords. It can be a challenge to figure out the right keyword though, so you should really dive into your audience’s heads. Also, there are SEO tools and plugins such as Yoast that can help you in the optimization process.
Incorporate these keywords in your post appropriately and where relevant in a natural way. It’s never a good idea to force them where they don’t make sense. Keep in mind that search engines do not like keyword stuffing, and you may end up getting penalized for it.
Google uses latent semantic indexing or LSI, so using the exact keywords to substitute similar terms is not as important as it used to be. But it will be worth it to use those relevant keywords, just make sure you don’t exaggerate or overuse them.
2. How To Use Your Keywords Properly
If you’re looking to get a high rank for a particular term, make sure to use it quite often within your text. You want to send Google a message that your post is all about that specific keyword. Again, do not go overboard as it should go naturally with your text.
The perfect keyword density is 2%, which is about one in fifty words. It is recommended to create a lengthy text of around 300 words so that you can use your keyword a few times.
Here are a few useful tips when using your keywords:
Long-tail keyword.
Using phrases that contain one
or two words are often quite hard to rank and competitive. It’ll be
worth your time to use longer relevant phrases instead. For instance, if
you want to target a general keyword in your blog post like SEO, it
will make more sense to be more specific and use “optimize a website for
local SEO” instead of just “SEO.”
Consider voice research.
More and more people
are using Alexa and Siri. Thus, it is now becoming essential to optimize
your content for voice research. Also, it’s still new, and not all
businesses are considering it, so it’ll be beneficial on your part to
utilize it to get ahead of your competition.
3. Optimize Your Post Title
Your post title is one of the key elements that the search engines pay close attention to, to understand what your page is about. This is a great chance to use your primary keyword for communicating your content.
Make sure to incorporate it in a way that makes a lot of sense. If it’s included in a way that will confuse your readers, there’s a high chance that they will not click your link. And the absence of clicks will hurt your SEO efforts a lot more than help it by using your keyword.
4. Optimize Your Subheadings
You also need to consider using your focus keyword in at least one of the subheadings in your post. Search engines also give weight to page headings to determine what your page is offering. Those <h1>, <h2> or <h3> tags are usually a good place to include your secondary keywords.
5. Customize Your URL With Your Keyword
The URL of your page is also an important element of your blog where you can place your focus keyword. Search engines also consider it when trying to figure out and understand what your page is, making it an essential ranking factor.
Before publishing your page, it’s a good idea to customize its URL first. So if your blog post is about optimizing images to get better SEO results, your URL should be like /how-to-set-custom-domain-on-blogger.html
6. What About Those Snippets?
Unfortunately, there’s no assurance that Google and other search engines will display that particular snippet. But your SEO strategy should always include creating an awesome snippet preview that contains your focus keyword.