If you have a blog that you regularly update for business, then chances are that you already know how important maintaining a blog can be. Not only is business blogging a great way to reach out to followers and potential or existing customers, but it’s also a fantastic opportunity to enhance your SEO.
Maintaining a blog by posting regular blog articles is a great first step for your blog to contribute to your SEO. How? Because you are adding fresh, relevant content to your website on a regular basis – always a good thing for SEO. But… what if you could take this a step further and make each specific blog post more search engine friendly?
We’ve shortlisted 6 key tips to help you optimise your blog posts for SEO:
1. Keyword Research
The best starting point is to research some key terms that are already being typed into Google in relation to your latest blog topic.
For example, if your business is a gym and you want to write your next blog post about ‘staying fit in winter’ – then you should research this topic in a free keyword research tool such as the Google Ads Keyword Planner Tool and SEMRush.
Bonus: Using a keyword research tool may even offer insight into your competitors and the keywords and phrases they are targeting.
2. Using the Researched Keyphrases in your Blog Post
Once you have researched a shortlist of keywords for your blog post, it’s time to make use of them. It’s always important to write for the user and not search engines, however, including the keywords in important places will greatly assist with SEO performance.
When writing your article, here are some places you should look to include your keywords in:
- Title
- Headings and sub-headings
- Introductory sentence
- Concluding paragraph
- Anchor text (text you hyperlink to other related pages on your site)
- Title tags
- Meta descriptions
Tip: You should never ‘stuff’ more keywords than is necessary into your blog articles as this tactic may then work against you. Google is highly renowned for noticing ‘keyword stuffing’ and doesn’t rank those websites favourably.
3. Optimise Images
First of all, you should be including at least 2 or more images in a blog post to keep the user engaged and to increase relevant on-page content. The next step is to make sure that the file name, and the alternative text (alt tag) include a brief description of the image.
This is also an opportunity for you to include those important keywords, but once again – no stuffing!
4. Link to Old Posts Where Possible
Another great tactic is to improve your internal linking, and an easy way to do this is to link to an old blog post. You don’t have to do this many times in the same blog post but done on a regular basis. For example, 1 internal link per blog post could be a good way to stay accountable.
Bonus: Take your optimisation further and improve your SEO with our 5 Easy Ways to Speed Up Your Website Today blog post guide
5. Choose Tags and Categories Strategically
If you use a popular CMS such as WordPress, then you’ll know how easy it is to add tags and categories to your blog posts. Using this functionality is a great navigational tool for users (and search engines!).
So, next time you create a blog post, simply assign a few simple but relevant tags and categories so that your content can be easily filtered.
Tip: It’s important to keep the number of tags and categories to a minimum to ensure the most effective use for both users and search engines.
6. Embrace Social Media
If you’re going to all of the effort of maintaining an SEO friendly blog, then you should definitely be spreading the word each time you do so.
By embracing social media and sharing your latest blog posts among users in Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest – whatever is most relevant for your business – you can increase the exposure significantly.
There are many free tools out there to help you do this, such as Hootsuite, which can sync all of your social media accounts together and even allows you to schedule your posts ahead of time.
There you have it. 6 quick and easy ways to optimise blog posts for SEO. If you’d like more information or assistance with your business blog, then we can help with content creation, SEO or general digital marketing.
