Creating SEO-friendly blog posts is an excellent way to improve your search rankings. Content is the root of most people’s SEO strategies, but that doesn’t mean they always use SEO appropriately, especially in their blog posts. According to a study from Conductor, 66 percent of companies combine their content creation strategies with their SEO campaigns for best results.
Any website seeking higher search rankings and greater online credibility needs to incorporate more SEO-friendly content into their strategies. It means a greater focus on proper keywords, publication sites, relevant topics, headings, subheadings, and more.
As you learn to write blog posts for the benefit of both search engines and your readers, your rankings will increase and you’ll gain more valuable customers as a direct result.
1. Use Local Keywords
Keywords don’t hold as much clout in SEO as they once did, but they can still improve your content visibility. A few, well-placed keywords can make all the difference in promoting your web presence. Local keywords are particularly useful if you offer products or services in a specific area.
Green Residential, a property management company in Houston, encourages their clients to use local keywords to enhance their blog posts. “There’s no need to stuff your articles full of keywords,” they say in a blog post. “This is an outdated SEO tactic that can actually hurt your search engine rankings rather than help them. Simply using the keywords a couple of times in the article where they fit appropriately will help bring you search traffic.”
2. Optimize Images
All the content in a blog post can and should be optimized for the purposes of SEO. When your images include captions with specific keywords and tags, you increase the likelihood that your content will show up in search results. Not only will your blog post better match web search queries, but it will better match image searches.
Optimizing images is fairly simple. Place keywords in the file name and fill out the alternate text field with the same information. Include a brief, descriptive caption underneath the photo to enhance its online visibility.
3. Make Blogs Mobile Friendly
“While responsive design and mobile-friendly websites have always been important for user experience, they’re becoming more and more important for SEO as well,” writes Lindsay Kolwich, marketer and contributor for Hubspot. “So if you haven’t been focusing on improving your mobile experience, you’d better prioritize it now, or your search rankings could suffer.”
A few years ago, Google released an important algorithm update that demanded responsive design in exchange for higher rankings. Now, Google always displays mobile-friendly options first for search queries on a mobile browser. Since more than 60 percent of internet users access web content through their mobile devices every day, this knowledge is paramount to SEO success.
4. Optimize Article Length
Having the perfect article length is not just a tactic for keeping your readers engaged. It’s also a key contributor to higher search rankings. Articles that are too long or too short won’t be seen as informative or credible enough for Google to categorize.
At the very least, articles should be 300 words, but 500 serves as a better minimum. Google favors long, comprehensive guides of 2,000 words or more because of their high value. However, the perfect length for typical blog posts is about 1,000 words.
5. Work on Link Building
Link building is one of the best SEO strategies to date. Start by placing links for your existing blog and webpage content in your onsite blog content. “It will make your post stronger because you show some authority on the subject,” explains Marieke van de Rakt of Yoast SEO. “Next to that, your link structure is important for your ranking in Google as well. And of course, your reader might be interested in these related posts too.”
An external linking strategy is also beneficial. For best results, create content to be published on other publishing sites with a link to your website camouflaged within. Based on the authority of the publisher and the quality of the article, your link automatically sends a quality signal to the search engine algorithm. When a visitor clicks on that link, you’ll boost your SEO even more.
The journey to great SEO on your website will be more like a slow moving elevator than a rocket. Your goal is to see steady, upward improvement as you apply these principles to your blog content.
Originally posted on October 24, 2017 @ 10:01 pm