How to Optimize Your Blog for Search Engines
Increasing traffic to your website comes down to understanding (and executing on) the science behind effective content. Despite the booming growth of social media platforms, podcasts, YouTube videos, and other new forms of content over the past decade, the traditional company blog is still the most effective content marketing medium over time.
How can you make sure your company blog stands out from the crowd and increase your ranking in search? The secret lies in writing engaging content that’s SEO-friendly.
How does SEO-friendly content work?
As you know, SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and refers to how easily a search engine can find and recognize your blog post. The more SEO-friendly your blog is, the easier it will be for a search engine to suggest it to relevant audiences.
An easy way to understand how SEO works is to think of the internet as a giant library and your web browser as your personal librarian. When a patron comes into the library looking for a book on a specific topic, a librarian will often suggest several different books on that topic so they can choose what best meets their needs. Similarly, when you open your web browser and type in a question, your search engine instantaneously scours the entire library of billions of web pages to find and suggest specific web pages that are most relevant and most likely to answer your question.
If your blog posts are not written with an SEO focus in mind, then search engines are less likely to suggest them as frequently as they do other web pages. This makes it difficult for readers to find and enjoy the fantastic content that you are producing.
Steps to optimize your blog
You can help potential readers find your blog posts more easily by taking extra steps to optimize your content and improve your ranking.
Each web browser uses an algorithm to assign a rank to the web pages in its library. This rank is based on a variety of factors, including internal details like keywords, domain credibility, user friendliness, mobile accessibility, as well as external factors like in-bound links from other websites. The higher your blog post ranking, the higher it will show up in the search results.
Where your blog posts rank largely determines the traffic to your website. After all, when was the last time you looked at page two of your Google search results?
Here are a few tips for using effective SEO to help boost your blog post rankings:
Include links to other reputable websites
One criteria search engines will use to determine your blog post’s credibility is a review of the reputable websites you link to. You can help boost your rankings by linking to several external articles or web pages that are relevant to your blog topic. Don’t go crazy, though. Too many links can also hurt your credibility.
Improve the experience for readers
Optimize your titles and subheadings with phrases that people are likely to search, as well as add meta descriptions and image alt tags. Adding this data only takes a few extra minutes, but it can drastically improve the overall user experience. (You can also get help from our friends at ClemSEO.)
Choose a well-coded platform
Do your best to select a secure platform to host your blog posts, preferably one with an https SSL certificate for additional security and that also offers a mobile view. Web pages that aren’t mobile-friendly tend to rank lower than those who can offer both a mobile and desktop view.
Use the right keywords
Keywords help improve the chances of interested audiences finding your blog post. Thoroughly research your keywords and choose them carefully to make sure you are ranking for the right topics. You can find out what people are already searching for by using keyword analysis tools like Raven Tools, Keyword Discovery, or Google Adwords Keyword Tool. We also recommend our colleagues at the STIR agency, whose expertise is “evidence-based content planning.”
Remember, keywords are important, but a list of keywords alone is not an SEO content marketing strategy. Be careful not to let the quality of your blog posts drop in order to stuff extra keywords. Instead, find ways to creatively add the keywords you need while still keeping your content reader-friendly. (Or hire a content marketing agency, like Comma! We’d love to hear about your content needs and see if we’re a good fit.)
If wordsmithing your blogs to naturally include keywords or producing enough content to publish regularly sounds daunting, Comma is here to help! Let our experienced content writers do the heavy-lifting to make your blog posts both engaging and SEO-friendly. Schedule a free 15-minute consultation with us today.