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Top Tips to Optimize Your Blog Posts for SEO

Most businesses know about search engine optimization, and some businesses implement SEO techniques, but not every business has the right SEO plan. When a business optimizes their blog posts and web pages, their website becomes more visible to people on search engines. Therefore, if you have a product or service on your website — people will see it when they find your website on SERPs.

Blogging is one of the most effective ways to rank your website in the SERPs. You need informative, engaging, and a well-written content that adds value to the reader. You also need to add various SEO tricks to your posts.

Posting regular blog posts give you opportunities to target different keywords, keeps visitors on your website longer, and gives other websites something to link back to.

Keeping your blog post up and writing interesting content for it are both essential things, but you can make that work better for your SEO efforts by taking important steps to optimize your blog posts for SEO.

Blogging is important for SEO because it helps with various things that are important ranking factors. When you have a blog post that’s regularly updated with posts that are unique and on different topics relevant to your target market, it can make a huge difference to how your website performs.

Keep your website unique with blog posts

If you ever visited a website that you realize hasn’t been updated in years, you lose interest in the information you are seeing. The business it represents could have gone out of industry completely or the website could be giving information that’s been completely outdated or changed since that last update.

Google never shares outdated information with users. Websites that are regularly updated indicates that the website is alive and providing relevant information. It also gives the search engine more reason to index your website, keeping it more on their radar over time.

You are not going to have a reason to update your website homepage content frequently, so a blog posting is the perfect tool for adding fresh content to your website on a regular basis.

Keep visitors on your website for longer

Google’s top priority is providing the people performing searches with the relevant information they are looking for, so they will keep coming back to use Google again and again.

If someone clicks on the first link in the SERPs, then finds it unhelpful and immediately leaves to go back to the search page. This action indicates Google that the first search result wasn’t as useful as it should. On the other hand, when a user clicks on the link and stays on the website for a while, it shows to Google that this website is really very helpful.

Someone who visits your website from a blog post that shows up in the SERPs is going to have more reason to stick around for a while and read the whole content than someone who lands on a webpage with less text or information.

And that becomes more the case with the long informative blog posts. SEO researchers have found that blog posts with super long content tend to perform better than shorter ones.

Target long-tail keywords

People start out practicing SEO want to look for the most relevant keywords for your business. For example, if you deal in outdoor camping equipment, you need to show up on the top in SERPs for the term “outdoor camping equipment.”

While that’s fine, unless you are the leading outdoor camping equipment brand in the country, you are probably going to have a hard time landing a higher rank for that search. SEO is highly competitive. The right thing for businesses is to look for longer, more relevant keywords people are looking for that are specific to your business and try to rank high for those.

These are called long-tail keywords and they are very important for any SEO technique – half of all search results are for terms that are four words or longer. But these can be hard to try to fit into your website product pages. However, they are the perfect kind of terms to target in a blog post.

Choose Internal Link Building

Links and internal links are the simplest ones for you to get since you can create them for yourself. Failing to perform internal linking on your website that point users from one webpage on the website to another is one of the common SEO errors you can make.

While you can perform effective internal linking on the main pages of your website, once you start posting engaging blogs, the opportunities will really blossom. As you add more posts on different but related topics, you create more opportunities to naturally link those pages to each other.

Every time you do so, you can use the anchor text to indicate Google what the page you are linking to is about – making strong connection to your targeted keywords in how the algorithm sees it.

Make Strong Connection with Your Audience

When people reads a post they love, they are more likely to share it with others, generate more traffic to it, visit your website again to see more of your content and maybe sign up for your email list. When you get lots of web traffic and repeat website visitors, it indicates Google that people like your website and improves your authority level in their algorithm.

And while that’s superb from search engine optimization perspective, it is ultimately more important to the success of your website than where you are in the rankings. People in your target audience visiting your website, connecting with it, and becoming followers is more valuable than any top rank on Google. Here are the important steps for blog optimization.

Relevant Keyword Research

Keyword research is one of the main steps in developing an effective blog strategy for SEO services because it helps you find different topics your audience is interested in. For each blog post you share, it is important to have a primary keyword or two in mind, along with a few similar or related secondary keywords. You can insert these keywords in the post where required, but only when it makes sense to do so.

Choose Engaging Title of the Blog Post

One of the essential parts of the page the search engines pay attention to in trying to know and understand what the page is all about is the title. Your blog post title gives you opportunity to convey your topic by using your targeted keywords.

Insert keyword in a way that makes sense. If you insert it in the wrong way, it can be confusing for your post readers and the lack of clicks you get will harm your SEO efforts more than use of the keyword will help them. But since your blog post will be covering the topic of your target keyword, finding the right way to add it shouldn’t be too difficult.

Optimize Your Headings

Your webpage headings are another important part of the page that search engines give importance in figuring out what your page is about. That means that you will get more opportunities to naturally insert your targeted keywords in the page heading. That includes anything that has a <h1>, <h2>, or <h3> tag on the page.

Headings are generally right place for the secondary target keywords you have in your mind, since it won’t make sense to use your primary keywords in every heading on the page.

Use Relevant Internal Links.

Links are considered as one of the most important ranking factors for the search engine algorithms. Getting other websites to link to your website is a challenge, but you can do relevant internal linking on your own website easily.

When you write a new blog post, consider any blog post you have already shared that are related to what you are writing at present. Wherever required, add in those links and, if you can do so naturally, use relevant anchor text that relates to your targeted keyword for the older blog post you are linking to.

Write a Meta Description.

While meta descriptions don’t affect your ranking in the SERPs, they affect what people see when they are browsing their choices on the search engine result pages. If they are trying to decide between a few links on the page, a description that uses the similar keywords they searched for could make the real difference in their picking to click on your link.

Link Your Fresh Blog Post to Old Blogs

If you are looking for opportunities to add old links from your blog post to new posts, you should periodically review your old blog posts to look for opportunities to link to posts that were published later.

One way you can do this is by doing a search of your own site for the target keyword of each new post you write. When you find uses of that keyword or similar terms in your old blog posts, you can add in a link to the new one.

Select Right Tags and Categories for Blogs

Blog posts enable you to choose tags and categories that help you group related posts together. This acts as a helpful navigation for people browsing your blog posts and a tool you can use for SEO. Every tag or blog category you choose creates a new page that will include the name of the tag or category in the URL, along with relevant content and links on the page.

SEO techniques are complex. For business owners that understand SEO is important, it can be tempting to skip some of the smaller steps involved in on-site SEO. But every little thing you can do to improve your website’s SEO makes a difference — particularly if it is something other sites may be overlooking. If you are running a law firm, and want to show your clients that you’re a skilled and capable lawyer, choose professional law firm seo services. Having an informative blog post about your law firm services can help with your website SEO, and by extension, help potential clients find you online.

Final thoughts

Blogging is one of your powerful SEO tools. Every blog post you share offers a number of opportunities to enhance your website’s search authority. Don’t waste any opportunity you have to use your blog posts to their fullest SEO potential with professionals. At Power Funnels, we specialize in Search Engine Optimization and  help to boost your company’s reputation, both on and offline.