10 Ways to Optimise your Blog Content for Search Engines

Blogging is one of the most cost-effective marketing investments you can make for your business. It’s an extraordinarily valuable tool for you to engage with customers and ultimately make their lives easier which is what business is all about! Every single post you publish is a long-term asset that helps build brand awareness and promote your expertise, products and services.

If you already have a blog, chances are you understand the importance of business blogging. But do you understand the importance of Search Engine Optimization. Optimising your blog posts to make them easier to find in search engines?

FACT: By providing consistent, fresh and relevant content while at the same time performing some basic blogging optimisation strategies, you can hugely increase the opportunities associated with having your blog rank highly and having more customers reach your website!

Search engine optimisation is an incredibly important tool for businesses and helps to boost positioning of your website as a relevant answer to your customers questions. Google’s constantly changing algorithm updates can make this process a bit of a challenge, but as long as you have relevancy and intent top of mind, the following tips will be enough to get you started on optimising your blog and surging up to page one.

 1. Research

A no-brainer. It’s important to complete research into the keywords that can help optimise your blog. Chances are, you’re already naturally doing this simply by providing valuable content on a topic that’s relevant to your product or service. There are also a range of tools and techniques that can assist you in finding the right keywords to include in your posts. The Google Adwords Keyword Tool and offers 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.

  2. Keywords

Now that you’ve researched which are the best keywords to be using, it’s important to place them where they will have the most impact and return the best result. You should be using them throughout your blogpost including:

  • Title
  • Headings and subheadings
  • First sentence
  • Last sentence
  • Anchor text
  • Title tags and meta descriptions

*Note to self: Don’t partake in keyword stuffing, not only will it be off-putting to your readers, it will be penalised by Google.

3. Long Tail Keywords

You should also be optimising your blog posts for keywords that match the intent of your ideal reader. A good rule of thumb is to focus on one or two long-tail keywords per blog post. These longer, often question-based keywords keep your post focused on the specific goals of your audience. Website visitors searching long-tail terms are more likely to read the whole post and then seek more information from you. In other words, you’ll generate the right type of traffic: visitors who convert.

4. Optimise images

Whenever you’re adding a photograph to your post, you should also be including keywords in the file name and the alt text field with a brief, keyword rich description.

5. Link to other sites as well as your own content

Good blogging etiquette dictates that you should be mentioning other relevant websites or resources (preferably not those of your competitors…). Not only is this generally useful information for your readers and followers, but hopefully you may receive some links in return! It’s also very valuable to link to other pages and content within your own site as well.

6. Have a subscribe option

Try to include a prominently placed RSS feed of subscribe button. This will not only be beneficial to your readers as it will give them an instant notification, but it helps Google to easily index your blog content through the feed.

7. Take advantage of social media

You can vastly broaden the reach of your blog posts while at the same time optimising for search engines just by posting on social media. As a business, you are likely already using these platforms so make sure you always share your content on your pages to get the most mileage out of them!

8. Make sure your blog is mobile friendly

Now more than ever, people are using their smartphones for absolutely everything! Google tends to display mobile friendly results first. Websites that are responsive in design also allow blog pages to have just one URL as opposed to being split by a normal website and a separate mobile one. As a result, you can centralise the SEO power gained from putting effort into optimising your blog.

9. Mix up your topic tags

Topic tags are very useful when it comes to organising your blog content, but it can be harmful to overuse them. Having too many topic tags can be penalised by Google as duplicate content – without it actually being duplicate content.

10. Use Google’s Search Console

Google’s free Search Console contains a section called the Search Analytics Report. This report will help you to assess any clicks that have come from a Google Search and it’s an extraordinarily useful tool in determining which keywords people are using to find your blog content.

By following these ten simple tips, you’ll be able to encourage higher rankings and higher web traffic to your blog and website. Are you too busy to keep up with blog optimisation? Don’t worry – we can help get you a much more prominent position on search. Get in touch to find out more.

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