Writing your blog posts with SEO in mind is crucial if you want to rank high on search engines.
When you optimize your web pages – including blog content – you make your website more visible to anyone searching for your business or service on search engines.
By positioning your website as a relevant answer to your customers’ questions, blogging can improve SEO quality. Blog posts that employ a range of on-page SEO techniques can help your site rank higher in search engines and appeal to more readers.
Read below to learn 9 tips for optimizing blog content for search engines, from an SEO agency:
1. Make your site mobile-friendly.
How do you make your blog responsive to mobile devices? Through the use of responsive design. Websites that are mobile responsive allow blog pages to have just one URL rather than two — one for desktop and one for mobile. This improves the SEO of your content because any inbound connections to your site will not be split across the two URLs.
As a result, the SEO benefits you get from these links will make it easier for Google to detect the worth of your post and rank it appropriately.
2. Intersperse keywords throughout the blog content.
It’s time to use one or two keywords in your blog post now that you’ve identified them. But, in order to rank high in search results, where should you include these terms?
Make sure your keyword is within the first 60 characters of your title, as this is where Google cuts off titles on the SERP. Google technically monitors pixel width rather than character count, and it recently increased the pixel width for organic search results from around 500 pixels to 600 pixels, which corresponds to around 60 characters.
Mention your keyword in the body of your post and in the headers at a regular cadence. That means incorporating keywords into your copy in a natural, reader-friendly manner. Avoid keyword stuffing at all costs to avoid being fined.
Search engines use your URL to determine the topic of your post, and it’s one of the first things they’ll explore on a page. Because each article has its own unique URL, you have a big opportunity to optimize your URLs, so make sure you put your one to two keywords in it.
Your meta description should tell search engines and readers about the substance of your blog post. That is, you must employ your long-tail term so that Google and your audience understand the subject of your piece.
3. Include a link to a relevant blog article.
Backlinks demonstrate how trustworthy your site is dependent on how many other relevant sites link back to yours. However, backlinks aren’t the be-all and end-all of link building. Linking to and from your own blog posts can also help your blog site rank higher in search results.
Search engines use inbound links to determine the legitimacy and relevance of your content. Internal links to other pages on your website are the same. It’s recommended practice to link to another blog post, ebook, or web page where you’ve written about a topic covered in your blog post.
Consider this a way to improve your SEO while also assisting your visitors in getting more information from your content.
4. Group related topics together.
Bloggers and specialists who work at an SEO agency have laboured to develop individual blog posts that rank for certain keywords in the way most blogs are now constructed. This disorganizes the situation and makes it difficult for blog readers to get the information they require.
When you write many blog posts about the same topic, your URLs compete for search engine rankings.
5. Improve your meta description.
To recap, a meta description is an extra text that displays in SERPs and informs readers about the link. The meta description provides searchers with the information they need to assess whether your content is what they’re looking for and, ultimately, whether or not to click.
Your meta description should include the long-tail keyword for which you are attempting to rank, in addition to being reader-friendly.
6. Make more evergreen content.
Make sure your blog content is evergreen when planning and composing. In other words, the content is about themes that will be relevant and beneficial for a long time.
Evergreen content will help to ensure that your blog (and website) receives consistent traffic long after it has been published, and the traffic it creates will assist you to develop leads over time.
SEO agency insider tip: All blog content should be evergreen, whether it’s a long-form essay, how-to guide, FAQ, instructional, and so on. The images you use in these postings should also be timeless.
7. Add alt text to images.
Images that help explain and support your topic should be included in blog posts as well as text. Search engines, on the other hand, don’t just hunt for photographs. Instead, people search for photographs containing alt text.
Perhaps you’re wondering why. Because search engines can’t “see” images as people can, the alt text of an image tells the search engine what the image is about. This helps those images rank higher on the images results page of the search engine.
Additionally, image alt text improves the user experience (UX). When a picture cannot be found or shown, this message appears inside the image container. Alt text is a type of HTML attribute that can be added to an image tag.
8. Include one or two long-tail keywords.
It’s not about stuffing as many keywords as possible into your blog content when it comes to keyword optimization. This actually harms your SEO because search engines regard keyword stuffing to be spam. It also doesn’t provide a nice reading experience, which is a ranking element that search engines increasingly value to guarantee you’re answering your visitors’ questions.
Focus on one or two long-tail keywords in every blog post as a general rule. While you can include multiple keywords in a single post, keep the focus small enough that you can spend effort optimizing for only one or two of them.
9. Make changes to existing content.
Although new content will help increase your SEO, you should also devote a significant amount of time and effort to improving your present blog material. Repurposing and upgrading your existing content, as well as eliminating any old content.
This is because a brand new piece of content takes a long time to settle on the search engine results page (SERP) and earn authority, whereas you can update an existing piece of content and reap the benefits almost immediately.
Not only will your updated content rank higher on the SERPs, increasing the number of visitors and leads, but updating an existing piece of content takes far less time and resources than creating a completely new post.
The final step is to delete any obsolete information that is no longer relevant to your target audience. Even if your goal is to make your content evergreen, some of it may inevitably become obsolete over time. This includes statistics, product information, and industry-specific information that changes over time.
On-Page SEO for Blog Content – Our Final Thoughts
As your website expands, so should your search engine optimization. You’ll be on track to create optimized blog content that will raise your rank on search engines once you establish the goals and intent of your potential readers and apply these best practices. While it certainly helps to work with an SEO agency to boost your rank, these tips will work for anyone.
If you’d like to learn more, step into our kitchen and schedule a one-on-one with our CEO & Founder, Jared Foxworthy!
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