If you have a blog, chances are you already understand the importance of business blogging. But do you know how to optimize your blog posts to make them more search engine friendly?
The truth is, many bloggers fail to take advantage of the enormous marketing potential of their blogs. In fact, a recent study by blogger.com shows that although roughly 60% of businesses have blogs, 65% of those blog owners haven’t even updated in the past year! By providing fresh, relevant content and performing basic blog post optimization, you can take advantage of the many benefits blogging offers
Here are six easy search engine optimization (SEO) tips to help get your blog noticed.
Do your research. Keyword research is essential for on page optimization. Chances are you are naturally including keywords without realizing it simply by providing valuable content on a topic. However, there are a variety of tools and techniques for finding related keywords relevant to your blog post that you may not have considered. The Google Adwords Keyword Tool and semrush.com both offer great tools that allow you to find keywords related to your topic and even spy on your competition to see what words and phrases they are targeting to bring traffic to their sites.
Utilize keywords throughout your post. Once you have targeted a couple of valuable, relevant keywords, it is important to place them where they will have the most impact for humans and search engine crawlers indexing your content. Try to include them in the following places:
Title
Headings and subheadings
Introductory sentence
Concluding paragraph
Anchor text (text you hyperlink to other related pages on your site)
Title tags and meta descriptions
A word of caution: Don’t engage in keyword stuffing, which is the act of filling your content with so many keywords that it becomes difficult to read. Not only will this irritate your blog followers, it will also get you penalized by Google. A couple of strategically placed keywords will do the trick.
Optimize your images. Whenever you upload a photo to your blog, be sure to include keywords in the file name and fill out the alternate text field with a brief, keyword rich description of the photo.
Reference others with links. When you mention another blogger or article in your blog post, include a link to the information you are referencing. Not only is it good blogging etiquette, but you may also get lucky and receive a link back. Quality links are a valuable commodity for any site looking to rank higher in search engine results pages.
Give readers the opportunity to subscribe to your blog. Include prominently placed RSS or Feed Subscription Buttons and offer viewers the ability to subscribe to your posts via email when possible. This allows your blog followers to have instant notification of your latest posts without having to periodically check your site for new content.
Use social media to broaden the reach of your blog posts. As a small business, you may be utilizing Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or other social media sites to create connections with potential and current customers. Why not promote your blog content on these sites for even more web exposure? Free programs like Hootsuite make it easy to post links to your latest blog post on all of your social media sites with just a couple of clicks. You can even schedule your posts ahead of time!
By following these simple SEO tips, you can encourage higher rankings in SERPS, increased web traffic, and higher customer conversion rates.
Blog SEO for the Modern Marketer: How to Optimize Your Posts
With Google making 10 algorithm changes in the last four months and keyword data getting harder to come by, it may be ideal for marketers to take a step back and get back to SEO basics.
Despite the revolving door of new algorithms and search engine policies, the fundamentals of getting your content found have remained pretty consistent.
So, let's save the hand-wringing and future-predicting for another day and keep it simple. Here’s what you need to know to optimize your blog posts for search.
Turn Keyword Research Into Blog Topics
No company can rank for everything (believe me, we’ve tried). Therefore, the best SEO strategy is to focus on a few key phrases or topics that are critical to your company.
Start with a topic you really want to rank well for -- in our case, it might be “inbound marketing." Then, put yourself in the shoes of your prospective customers (or better yet, interview a few). What would they search for that would bring them to your doorstep? What questions or challenges do they have that you can help address?
People are increasingly using full sentences or long phrases to find the content they need. With the proliferation of content, a simple search for “cars,” for example, is not going to get searchers the results they need. Thus, searches have become far more detailed and specific -- “what to know before buying a car,” “most trustworthy Volvo dealerships near Boston,” and so forth.
As a result of these more complex searches, Google has actually changed its algorithm to better fit conversational questions from searchers. This is good news for blogs, which are designed by nature to be educational, answer questions, and provide background info. It’s also good news because identifying these questions can give you a veritable hit list of search-friendly posts to write.
Optimize Blog Post Headlines and URLs
Once you have your list of blog posts, you’ll want to make sure you’ve optimized the headlines. Keywords do best when they’re at the front of the headline. So, for example, if we’re trying to rank our content to appear for searches about inbound marketing: "Inbound Marketing: Everything You Need to Know to Get Started" will do better than "Everything You Need to Know to Get Started With Inbound Marketing."
Keywords are important, but you also want to write the sort of headline that is likely to get clicked and shared frequently. The frequency with which a piece of content gets shared can positively impact its ranking on search engine result pages. In fact, in recent years, social elements have been increasingly important to search. We’ll touch upon that more below in the Social Search section.
You might want to test different headlines to see what style or format generates the most activity for you. One of the reasons list headlines, like “10 Reasons You Should Have Your Cake and Eat it Too,” are so common online is that they tend to attract more clicks.
Don’t force your content to fit a common practice, though. Instead, try out different headline structures. You may find that questions or humor work best for generating clicks and shares on social media. Additionally, keep your headlines short -- ideally, under 65 characters -- so that they don't get truncated in search engine results.
In addition to the title, search engines use the words in a page’s URL to determine if it's relevant to the search at-hand. So if you are able to edit the structure of your URLs, it’s imperative to make sure that you’re including keywords there too.
The URL serves as a nice backup for your headline in optimizing for keywords. You may decide that you want to be a bit more creative with your headline to generate more interest as the post gets promoted across your marketing channel. If you do that, a good URL structure can help.
The same rules apply for positioning the keywords in your URL. Keep keywords early and separate them by dashes. The URL hubspot.com/inbound-marketing is more effective than hubspot.com/inboundmarketing.
Create SEO-Friendly Links and Anchor Text
When search engine spiders crawl your blog, they don’t read every word. Instead, they scan for certain parts of your post: the headline, subheaders, alt-text of images, and anchor text. Anchor text is the word or phrase you highlight when you insert a hyperlink. Choosing the right words to hyperlink can help add some important SEO value.
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Anchor Text PlacementIn addition to choosing the right words, you want to think about the placement of those words. If you link to the same internal page multiple times in a single blog post, make sure you optimize the first occurrence of that link. Typically, search engines will rely more heavily on the first instance of anchor text for a given link than subsequent instances.
SEO and analytics company Moz has a great post and illustration that explains this practice. So whenever you use your blog to link to other content on your site, make sure that the first reference point includes the best keywords.
You also want to ensure you're linking to the right pages. Instead of dispersing your links and anchor text to a number of different pages, It may be better to point all of your traffic and internal links to a page that is already ranking so you can further advance its SEO weight.
(Tip for HubSpot Users: If you use HubSpot to blog, you'll see a real-time update of how many important keywords you've included in your post. Clicking on one of those keywords will show a listing of pages on your site that already rank for it. This means you can use your anchor text to drive traffic and hopefully improve where your rank in search results.)
Below is a list of pages on our website that rank for the phrase "keyword data." One page currently ranks fifth on Google for that keyword phrase. The other two pages rank much lower. We could drive traffic to the second and third pages on that list, but it probably would be a waste.