It can be difficult to fully comprehend SEO especially since Google keeps changing the policies and algorithms. Even SEO specialists are sometimes left wondering what they are doing wrong and right whenever the rules change. Well, one thing remains true to this day—blogging significantly boosts your business online.
There are many good reasons to blog. You can use it as a venue for building trust among your customers. You can also position yourself as a subject matter expert through maintaining a blog. Blog posts are also an efficient way of sharing news with the followers of your company. Of course, we will not forget to mention how some blog writing activities can increase your website’s rankings on search engines. Whether you own a small business or a national company, blogging definitely is an important component of your SEO strategy.
In this article, we will show you some essential blog SEO tips that you can use to maximise your site’s potential. Discover the best practices in ensuring that your blog is optimised for search engines.
1. Conduct Keyword Research
When learning how to optimise blog posts for SEO, it is important to know how to conduct keyword research. There may be a possibility that you’re naturally adding keywords when you produce valuable content on a certain topic. On the other hand, you may not have considered a variety of techniques and tools for discovering relevant and related keywords which you can use for your blog. You can use semrush.com and the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to find keywords that can enrich your content. You can even check which keywords and key phrases your competitors are targeting.
2. Create Valuable and Unique Content
Search engines put importance on unique, fresh and valuable content. The pages on your main website do not change very often. This is why you should maintain a blog that is updated with new content every week. Search engines prioritise sites with relevant and fresh content and feed them foremost to users. If you haven’t updated your website content for over a year, it’s likely that your site will rank lower on search engines.
Keep in mind that one of the main reasons why Google exists is to give users valuable and relevant search results. Every algorithm and policy they roll out is developed around that premise. One of the essential blog SEO tips you can use is to create unique content that can solve the user’s problems. If you are offering solutions to the problems or questions that users are searching for, then it is possible that your content will be shared on social media, gaining higher rankings on Google.
3. Incorporate Keywords throughout your Blog Post
Once you’ve conducted keyword research, remember to incorporate those words into your content. Make sure that you place them in areas that will create the most impact for web crawlers indexing your content, as well as for humans reading your blog.
Best Areas to Incorporate Keywords:
- Title
- Headings and subheadings
- Introductory paragraph
- Concluding paragraph
- Anchor text
- Meta descriptions and title tags
However, you should remember to avoid keyword stuffing. This is the frowned upon practice that involves filling the content with too many keywords. Doing so would make the content difficult to read. Aside from that, Google penalises websites that practices keyword stuffing. All you need is to strategically place the keywords.
4. Building Your Backlinks Naturally
If you are just new to the world of backlinks, you should know that they are essential to SEO and that not all links give the same results. Here are some things you need to know about backlinks:
Do not Buy Backlinks
While buying backlinks is the easiest way to acquire them, you should absolutely avoid this practice. Google openly states that it is against their guidelines to purchase backlinks to move your rankings higher. Getting such backlinks is not worth the risk of getting banned from Google.
Your Backlink Source is Important
It makes a huge difference if you get backlinks from good sources. It is best to get backlinks from aged domain names that rank excellently on search engines. For instance, if you get a single backlink from a domain name that ends in .edu or .gov, it will fare better than hundreds of other backlinks from weaker sources.
The Anchor Text is Important
The anchor text is the string of words which you attach the link to. For instance, in this sentence, you will see that the words SEO strategy are highlighted and used as an anchor text for a link. It is used to link a page to keywords that match its content. One of the best ways to build good backlinks is by producing unique content that is valuable and relevant to search engine users. You can also guest post on ranking blogs within your niche.
5. Ensuring that your Theme is Optimised
SEO has two components:
- Off-site practices which involve social media strategies and backlinks, among others
- On-site practices which involve optimising the theme of your website
It is important to optimise your theme because it is one of the ways that Google crawlers identify your blog as a trustworthy source. Here are some of the elements of an optimised theme:
Fast Loading
User experience is also important in optimising your blog, so make sure that your site loads fast. Your theme should be able to pull its weight and quickly load. Cache plugins are one of the ways to increase your site loading speed.
Mobile Responsive
More and more people are using smartphones when visiting Google. As such, the search engine prioritises sites that are mobile responsive.
Working Links
Navigation should work smoothly so make sure you clean up broken links.
Good Coding
When choosing a theme for your blog, make sure that it is cleanly coded so that Google spiders can easily read and determine that your site has all the elements needed for ranking high.
Secure SSL Domain
There has been an update from Google which involves deciding which to place higher in the event that two sites are of equal value. Google will rank the secure domain higher than the other one that is not secure. So, it is important that you use a secure SSL domain name even for your blog.
There are many ways you can optimise your blog for search engines. However, what is important is that you stand out from your competition so that users will remember your brand and keep coming back to your site.
If you want to learn if you have an SEO optimised site or you want to learn how blogging can help you gain a competitive edge online, contact Lollipop Digital today. Give us a call and we’ll give you a FREE website analysis!
