Maintaining your blog and keeping it on top of the Search engines is not an easy job. Blog posts today are in advantage with better visibility, thanks to the social media channels, but SEO still plays a big role in their online presence.
SEO is important for your blog because it helps you consistently get more traffic to your website. There are many different things and methods you can do to optimize your blog posts for SEO. The best time to optimize your blog content for SEO is during its creation, but you can always go back and improve your old articles as well, which is good.
Of course, Google’s search ranking algorithm has gone through countless changes since its beginnings. In the past, nobody could predict all the possible methods to push low-quality sites to the top of search results, but Google deals with them with algorithm updates.
In this article, we will give you some of the best blog SEO tips to help you optimize your blog posts for SEO like a pro, avoiding the impact of Google updates at the same time.
1. Create Your Content With Proper Keywords
Keyword research may be one of the most useful techniques used by content creators and SEO experts – with this research you can discover the most popular topics your users are interested in based on the SE data. If you’re a beginner you could probably think you can do it based on guesses, but keyword research can really save your time in the future and help you find out exactly what your users are searching for.
The keywords you find you can use to plan your content strategy – it is also a smart way to organize and plan your future blogs based on topics that people are actually looking for, so you don’t have to worry every day what to write about.
You can find many keyword research tools online, or you can search for it manually – it’s your choice.
2. An Effective Blog Post Title Is Half Of A Successful Blog
For search rankings, the title of your blog post is extremely important – a good title can make more relevance to your blog post, and more importantly, it can motivate users to click on your article when they see it on Google. How to make a blog post SEO friendly and catchy? Simply use your keywords in the title and make it click-worthy.
There are guides on how to write an effective headline and one of the most popular is called EMV or emotional marketing value. It recommends using power words that trigger specific emotional responses in users. You can also find plenty of guides, tips, and tricks online so you can check it out, and see how articles rank on Google.
3. Add Images And Videos To Your Blog Posts
Images and videos are always good ideas when you think about your blog post content because search engines often rank engaging content higher in search results. As images and videos are far more engaging than plain text you can imagine how you can prosper from it. Choose some attractive images and put them between paragraphs – you can find plenty of high-resolution and professional images online you can download free. Don’t copy images from other websites because you can get into legal problems if you don’t have permission, focus on high-quality images you can download from sites specialized for images and design resolutions. Sometimes the large size of visual material can be the reason for slow page loading, but sometimes it’s bad hosting that slows it – according to reviews on WebSite Planet, Hostinger has excellent solutions for all kinds of websites, so check it out. Once you choose proper visual material, be sure you have optimized it for SEO – if you have video don’t upload it directly on your site because it can drastically slow it down, and minimize the size of images using Photoshop or some online tools.
4. Meta Descriptions Are Important
The meta description can help your audience a lot about your blog. It’s an HTML meta tag you can add to any page, and in the case of a blog, it can be a short abstract that, besides a blog title, can bring the audience directly to your site. It also helps search engines for the crawl. Character limitations for the meta description are 155 so be sure you used the most important keywords and taglines.
5. Make Your Blog Attractive To Read
Search engines love attractive and readable content. Blogs that are easy to read are sometimes better ranked than blogs that aren’t user friendly. Why? When users see some attractive content it’s more likely that they will stay longer on your website, which is great. Users need approximately less than a second to decide whether the content is read-worthy or not, so you have a little time to keep their attention for further reading.
Improve content using headings, bulleted lists, and shorter sentences – everything that will make reading easier.
6. Optimize Your Old Blog Posts For Better SEO
Don’t forget about your blogs once they’ve published. Optimize both your new and old blogs because search engines love systematically optimized sites. Once you publish your new blog make sure you share and promote it on social media and add useful internal links that lead the audience to your old blogs – that will help them re-discover your older articles and make them relevant again. When you optimize blog posts for SEO you can also track its search rankings which can help you in your future strategy.
Conclusion
Some optimization methods take time to give results but they prove effective in the long run. Other methods work faster but they may end up leaving your site in a worse situation than before you started optimizing it. These methods are Google-friendly, and it must take time for full effect, but once you start using them and apply it in your usual routine you’ll see results.
