Search engine optimization (SEO) is such a pivotal piece of making marketable content that gets your website right where you want it—in front of consumer eyes. But SEO practices are not always easy or understandable, especially when Google’s algorithms keep getting smarter, and buyer behaviors are changing. In order to ensure your getting the most out of your blogs, here are several ways to optimize your blog posts for SEO:
1. Focus on long tail keywords
While optimization doesn’t call for keyword cramming, this doesn’t mean that keywords don’t have value. They are still important, so you need to do some research to make sure you are including the most natural long tail keywords in your post. What’s a long tail keyword? Check out the title!
Research what people are searching for, how they are wording it, what specific words continuously pop up, and how many hits these phrases receive. From there, you can pinpoint the very people asking the questions you’re answering.
2. Social media usage
The user experience—now an integral part of ranking factors—revolves around the continuous integration of social networking and media into other elements of the internet, like your blog. For small businesses and sole proprietors, linking your social media accounts to your blog is a big step in creating connections to customers. Not only that, but these links help give your blog life. People can see who is behind the words, adding credibility to your statements. Besides, the more you share your content, the more others will want to share it too, and this creates links back to the original source.
3. Optimize your media
Whenever you add an image, sound clip, or video to your blog, you are creating a void in the visible data. The reason is because, while internet algorithms are smart, they still can’t see multimedia aside from text and code, so you need to tell them what’s there. Be sure to add text details to the files, include keywords in file names, and fill out alternative text fields with succinct descriptions.
4. Keywords in all the right places
Naturally, once you have used that long tail keyword in a few sections of content, you should also be dusting your blog with one or two single keywords from your research. These keywords should be placed in important sections of content, such as within the title tag, meta description, alternative text, URLs, and h1 and h2 headers.
5. Mobile-friendliness
People are now using their mobile phones to search for things more than their computers. What does this mean? Google, who is forever in pursuit of an excellent user experience, is now favoring websites with mobile-friendly versions. This has been true since the Penguin algorithm update of 2015. In order to make a blog mobile-friendly, you need a “responsive web design,” which creates multiple URLs for different devices.
Closing Statement
Though these are simple ways to optimize your blog for SEO, they are also effective. By adding keywords to meta descriptions and title tags, correctly utilizing social media, and ensuring your blog is mobile-friendly, you can greatly impact the SERPs. In turn, this will ensure your target audience is seeking your work.