Do you want an SEO friendly blog? Here’s our top tips!
There are no set solutions for successfully search engine optimizing your blog, and there is a large amount of complex information to make sense of. In researching SEO optimization, I’ve seen quite a bit emphasis placed on the quality of the post’s content versus the writing. This doesn’t mean that you don’t have to write well, it means that you should also focus on a number of other things as well as your writing in order to obtain an SEO-friendly blog:
Keywords
Keywords and keyphrases are often stressed for an SEO friendly blog. Therefore, you should do a little keyword research to figure out what people type when they use search engines. You could either have a guess at it, or try using a free keyword tool, like Wordtracker, or Google AdWords: Keyword Planner. You’ll want to focus on low-competition key phrases that return less than 75,000 results, because the larger the return results, the less likely you are to be seen.
Content
The quality of the posts is a very important factor when creating an SEO friendly blog post. Once you’ve chosen your keyword or phrase, write or revise your article’s content so that it includes and is centered around your keyword/keyphrase without “keyword stuffing” (including your keywords over and over, more than would be appropriate in normal conversation). You should also aim for no less than 300 words per post. Adding blog content regularly is another way of ensuring visibility.
Headers
Headers (post and page titles) are important for user readability as well as SEO. Using keywords in headers helps Google understand the main topics of your post, and can help your visibility. Use your keywords in your subheadings, but don’t overdo it.
Images
You should have images that help explain your content. Make sure that you add alt text if your image doesn’t have one already. The search engine doesn’t know what the image means, so the alt text is like the translator. This is yet another way to boost the visibility of your post.
Links
Your blog post should have internal links whenever possible. If you’ve written about a topic you’re mentioning in another one of your blog posts, you should link to the post. This will not only help retain visitors to your website, but it also shows search engines the validity and relevance of your content.
WordPress SEO plugin
Known-safe, updateable WordPress plugins can help you write an SEO-friendly blog post. They will allow you to formulate meta description, analyze your text, analyze your keyword usage and the presence of links, images, etc. Yoast has an excellent SEO plugin that can help you optimize your posts.
Want to read more? Check out all our SEO blog posts. You might particularly like A Fresh Approach to SEO and Best Practices for Adding Links to Your Site.
