If you own a blog, you likely already understand clearly why it is important for your business. But it’s not enough just to have a blog. You also need to know how to optimize the blog posts for the search engines.
Some bloggers fail to achieve the full marketing potential of their blog. In order to reap the full benefits from your blogging efforts, you will need to keep your blog updated with relevant and fresh content.
You will also need to be sure that content is fully search engine optimized upon publication.
In this post, we are sharing six tips for easy optimization that will surely help to get your blog better placed on the SERPs.
Do Your Keyword Research
Keyword research is a prerequisite for any sort of on page optimization. Of course, you might be lucky and include keywords without even realizing it, by providing valuable content on a highly searched topic.
But you’ll find much better results if you put forth effort to find your keywords proactively.
You can draw from a wide range of tools and research techniques when attempting to find the right keywords for your own blog and website. For example:
- The Google AdWords Keyword Planner
- SEMrush
- WordStream
All of these are excellent tools for keyword identification. Many of the tools available today can even provide a view of what your competitors are targeting within their own content.
Properly Place Those Keywords
After identifying relevant and valuable keywords, you will need to properly optimize the on page for the content on your bloc, if you want to have the highest impact on overall organic performance.
It also pays to know what NOT to do, such as keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is where you use too many keywords throughout your content.
This practice is very poor form, as it makes the content difficult to understand or read. Not only will this irritate your followers, but it can also get you penalized by Google.
Focus on placing a couple of really good keywords in the right on page elements, and you’ll be better off than you will be over-stuffing your content with them.
Optimize The Images
Image optimization is one way to get a leg up on the competition, as many webmasters fail to even think about image alt-text.
Every time you add a new image, be sure to rename the file with keywords in the filename and also add a relevant Alt-Text.
Link To Your Sources Diligently
Any time you mention another blog/blogger or piece of information from an external article, link to the original source to give them credit.
Not only is it a good way of respecting the expert or content itself, but you very well might get lucky with a return link from the other website.
Provide a Way to Subscribe to Your Blog
This is extremely important. I highly recommend that you include a visible feed subscription or RSS button.
This way, your blog readers can subscribe to your posts whenever they want without having to email and wait for a response.
This will allow you to send notifications to your subscribers or blog followers about new posts whenever they go live, rather than hoping they check the site from time-to-time on their own.
Use Social Media to Promote Content and Widen Your Reach
As you are surely aware, social media has become a must have for websites in every industry niche.
As a small business, you can use Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or any social media platform to create a connection with current and potential customers.
Everyone wants exposure, and you’ll find that it is very effective to use social media for promoting your blog content.
You can use free programs such as Hootsuite to manage multiple platforms simultaneously, making it very easy to promote your latest blog post.
Optimize for Mobile
As we have seen on multiple posts here on Return On Now’s blog, your blog must be mobile friendly in 2018 and beyond.
Not only are the majority of searches made on mobile devices today, but Google has moved to a “mobile-first” indexing scheme as well.
Mobile friendliness and overall website performance / load times are mandatory now. Make sure your website and blog line up with the latest requirements.
Conclusion
I can’t stress how important it is for you to optimize all of your blog posts without fail.
But don’t just focus on the SEO — make sure the premise of the post and composition are top notch as well. Pick intriguing and original topics.
Have it go through a quality round of editing. Focus on excellence, not just quantity of published blog posts.
If you follow these simple times, you’ll quickly see improvements in rankings, traffic, and ideally, conversions.
Feature Image provided by the author under his or her own purchased license.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions stated in this post are that of the author, and Return On Now may or may not agree with any or all of the commentary.
Tiffany Watts
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