If you are looking to improve your site’s rankings on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) or are looking for ways to drive more visitors to your blog, make sure your blog has a focus on SEO. Online marketing companies are trending towards more content-driven marketing strategies as Google and other search engines change their algorithms to ensure top results are informative, relevant sites to what people are searching for. Having a blog is a great way to provide useful content for your audience while boosting rankings on SERPs. These 5 tips can help you quickly optimize your blog for search engine crawlers.
Keyword-Driven Content
Creating content that is valuable to your readers is the easiest way to optimize your blog. Writing about things in your industry and relevant to your brand is how businesses can make sure their articles have the right words and phrases for SEO. Non-business bloggers who produce fresh content on a consistent basis within a realm of topics have the same opportunity. Once you’ve drafted a post, read over to see where you can rewrite for a better incorporation of keywords. Don’t go overboard, but be sure to include the same keyword or phrase that you want to rank for more than once per post, about every 250 words. Remember that the keyword or phrase must tie in to your topic.
Meta, Title and Header Tags
In brief, Meta Tags include information that a web master incorporates in the Head of the code (HTML) of a webpage. The Meta description gives an outline of what the page is all about while Meta keywords list the keywords for which the page can be found. With the right subject keywords in a Title Tag, you’ll be able to see a real difference in your web rankings over time. Header Tags are also an important part of your blog post. These define sections of a web page and are given weight by search engines. If you use H1, H2 tags effectively, the proper usage of keywords can help search engines rank the post, your site, and the content.
Optimized Images
Many bloggers and businesses who are new to the world of blogging and SEO don’t realize they can generate a lot of organic traffic by ensuring all images have the right, keyword-focused alt and TITLE attributes. The Google crawler, or Googlebot, can’t see your images, so it looks at the alt attribute for a text equivalent of the image to determine what it is about. Thus having an alt attribute is useful in rankings, especially those of images. Your blog post visuals should include the keyword or subject that is the focus of your blog post in the alt tag.
Internal Linking
Of course, outbound links are important. However, linking from one blog post to another is a great way to keep the reader’s attention while boosting the SEO of your blog and/or site. Link keywords and phrases to other blog posts, pages, or categories you’ve written about. Some blogging platforms have widgets or plug-ins that accomplish this for you, as it can be time consuming. Another option to make certain words is by making them bold, or using the HTML “strong” coding. There is some debate about the difference in emphasis placed on bold words and strong words. Try to use the <strong> tag a couple of times in your post with keywords that are relevant to the topic you are writing on, preferably to enhance the visual flow of layout.
Be Unique
Providing unique content is one the easiest ways to optimize your blog post. Instead of spinning other articles you’ve come across, create unique articles that meet the needs and demands of your readers. Optimized content is easily accessed, read, crawled and shared. If you’ve provided good content that others can link to, you’ll boost your SEO efforts without much effort on your end. Others sharing and linking to your post is always good for SEO purposes.
Look for widgets and plug-ins that automate these blog SEO optimization strategies for you, or at least streamline the process so you can focus on providing valuable and unique content, not just optimizing your post for search engines. Keep keywords in your titles, headers, image tags and content so search engines can find your site, the informative copy and tagged images to rank your site higher on SERPs.
Erica Bell is a small business writer who focuses on topics such as financing a small businessonline marketing campaigns. She is a web content writer for Business.com
