Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important part of writing blog posts, if not the most important. SEO helps your content show up high in search results, which is important if you want to get your website found.
There are dozens of complex formulas that computers and software use to determine which web pages meet a search better than others. Knowing how those formulas work would take many hours of research, and possibly a computer engineering degree, but that doesn’t mean regular joe schmo’s like me and you can’t figure out how to benefit from it.
Through my many hours of research and experience of playing around with SEO, I have found a handful of SEO tips that really work when writing a blog post.
Use Keywords
Do your research and find the best relevant keywords for your topic. You can have any number of keywords that you want, but I suggest using between one and three keywords. If you try to use too many, the SEO for your post can become too crowded and that will actually rank you lower. Overuse of your keywords will also rank you lower. My general rule of thumb is to shoot for your keywords to be about 2-3% of your overall word count. Use a keyword planner to help determine your best keywords.
Put Keywords in the Right Places
Keyword placement is a major key to making SEO work. There are certain places that the computers and software will look for keywords and placing your pre-chosen keywords here will help your blog post stand out more. These places are titles, subtitles, captions, and the first sentence of your blog post, preferably in the first 120ish characters.
Optimize Images
As mentioned earlier, captions are a major place that you should be putting your keywords, but that’s not all you should be doing to your images. Everyone knows that you always, always, always, need to include a photo with a blog post because, say it with me now, photos make blog posts sharable and clickable. But, you should also SEO your images with the use of tags or alt text. Include one or more of your keywords in the alt tags of your images and try to make it something coherent, not just a string of words.
Take Advantage of Tags
Again with the tags! Images are not the only ones with tags. Your entire post should have somewhere to add tags. Tags are very important to SEO. Anything from each webpage to each blog post can have tags. These let the search engine know that your website meets certain search requests. Make sure you drop your keywords in here so that way, your post gets found.
Add Links
Links in the body of your blog post will boost your SEO ranking. You can link back to anything- another blog post, an infographic, or any website. When you go to add these hyperlinks into your blog post, choose a relevant place to add the link. Make sure that the link is in some of your keywords.
Don’t Forget Social Media!
Social media is certainly a separate beast that needs taming, but it is relevant to talking about with SEO. Some people say that social media boosts SEO while some people say it doesn’t matter. Either way, social media can help your viewership. Make sure to always share your new post on social media and, if you can, work out a social media schedule or campaign that recycles content every week to boost your views to their best potential. (You can contact me if you need help with social media strategies.)
Extra SEO Tips
- Shoot for writing at least 500 words
- Don’t copy and past from another source- it’ll make your post rank low (and that’s just cheating anyway)
- Use a blog post planner to help organize your thoughts
What SEO tips have you found that always works for you?
For more help with SEO blog posts that go viral, you can purchase my Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Guide e-book with a printable checklist or you can look into my content writing services to bring your website fresh traffic.
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