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 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 blog post optimization, you can take advantage of the many benefits blogging offers.
A blog is a long-term marketing asset that will bring traffic and leads to your business. It introduces you as a thought leader in your space and allows you to earn people’s trust.
Here are 7 SEO tips to help get your blog optimization process:
Tip # 1 Research:
Keyword research is essential for on page optimization. Chances are you are naturally including keywords without realizing it simply by providing valuable content on a topic. However, there are a variety of tools and techniques for finding related keywords relevant to your blog post that you may not have considered. The Google Adwords Keyword Tool and SeMRush.com both offer great tools that allow you to find keywords related to your topic and even spy on your competition to see what words and phrases they are targeting to bring traffic to their sites.
Tip # 2 Utilize keywords throughout your post:
Once you have targeted a couple of valuable, relevant keywords, it is important to place them where they will have the most impact for humans and search engine crawlers indexing your content. Try to include them in the following places:
- Title
- Headings and subheadings
- Introductory sentence
- Concluding paragraph
- Anchor text (text you hyperlink to other related pages on your site)
- Title tags and meta descriptions
A word of caution: Don’t engage in keyword stuffing, which is the act of filling your content with so many keywords that it becomes difficult to read. Not only will this irritate your blog followers, it will also get you penalized by Google. A couple of strategically placed keywords will do the work.
Tip # 3 Optimize your images:
Whenever you upload a photo to your blog, be sure to include keywords in the file name and fill out the alternate text field with a brief, keyword rich description of the photo.
Tip # 4 Reference others with links:
When you mention another blogger or article in your blog post, include a link to the information you are referencing. Not only is it good blogging etiquette, but you may also get lucky and receive a link back. Quality links are a valuable commodity for any site looking to rank higher in search engine results pages.
Tip # 5 Create Call to actions:
Blog gives you real estate to place calls-to-action in order to convert. At this stage of the game you are trying to retain your blog readers and engage them further with your website and your content. So you might ask them to attend your webinar or to download a free guide that you have. Calls-to-action introduce your prospects into the buying process and start qualifying them.
Tip # 6 Give readers the opportunity to subscribe to your blog:
Include prominently placed RSS or Feed Subscription Buttons and offer viewers the ability to subscribe to your posts via email when possible. This allows your blog followers to have always notification of your latest posts without having to periodically check your site for new content.
Tp # 7 Use social media: Whenever you publish a new blog post, you should automatically publish it to the main social networks: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+. The most popular locations for buttons are above the content, below the content, or to the left of the content.
