4 Ways to Optimize Your Blog Posts for SEO
By Janet Anthony
Sure, social media is a useful way to get your blog in front of people. At the same time, it takes constant work and constant updating in order to keep up a flow of traffic â and getting your posts in front of new people can be a lot of hard work.
If you rank highly enough in the search algorithms that people actually find your site (harder than you may think, as only 5% of people actually get past the first page of search results) youâll get a constant flow of people to your website, all of them are new, and all of them are looking for something.
Now doesnât that sound excellent?
Of course, getting there takes a bit of work. Just like turning yourself into a superhero blogger isnât something that just happens, youâre going to have to work at ranking well in terms of SEO. Youâve got to take the right steps. Today weâre going to explore what those are.
Do your research
Make certain that you actually find out what keywords do well and aim for those. There are numerous tools available online (just search for âkeyword explorerâ or something similar) that you can use a couple of times a day for free. If you use all of them, you can actually get a pretty good idea what phrases you should go for.
Why should you go through this effort? Thatâs because some phrases get searched for more often than others, while other phrases have far more competition than others. You want to find that sweet spot where competition is low, but the number of searches aims at those words or that phrase are high.
If youâre just starting out, be sure to aim at the low competition, as youâll actually be able to rank decently there. Sure, a trickle of traffic isnât great, but itâs better than not getting any traffic at all!
(Host bloggerâs commentary: Instructions for finding low competition are in the Google Keyword Planner tutorial.)
Aim at long-tail keywords
If youâre just starting out, then donât immediately aim for the obvious keywords. Chances are pretty good that those are incredibly hard to break into, as there is a lot of competition for them. Instead, aim at long-tail keywords.
What are long-tail keywords? Â These are phrases containing several words. They might be a question like âhow do I get to Timbuktu?â, or a precise search term like âgear shifts for V6 engines.â The point of this is that yes, people will obviously search for them less, but those people who do search for them know exactly what theyâre looking for.
That means that if your page fulfills that need, theyâre more likely to stick around, reducing your bounce rate (or how many people leave your page without clicking on) and that search engines will rank you better.
Whatâs more, if youâre selling something, then youâre far more likely to actually sell something at this stage, as the people have moved on from their initial search stage and now know what they want, meaning theyâre far closer to buying what youâre selling.
Include the keywords in your post
In fact, you donât just want to include them in your post, you want to â if possible â include them in your title. Most search engines pay far more attention to your title than they do the body of your text. And that is quite logical, as that is obviously what users are going to pay more attention to as well.
Also, if possible, make certain to include them in your subheadings as well, as these again are considered more important by search engines than the main body of your text.
Donât keyword stuff. Whatâs that? Thatâs when you put your keywords in as many times as possible. In years gone by that was a good way to get search engines to rank you more highly. Nowadays, however, you get punished for that, as itâs considered unnatural.
So put it in a couple of times, but donât overdo it.
Found great keywords? Make sure your content rocks
Sometimes you just rattle off a page and post it. Thatâs great for a great deal of your content. Those times, however, when you find a really great keyword, you shouldnât do that. Instead, make sure that post really rocks. Be sure to avoid the common mistakes in writing, and also donât just write it in one day, but come back to it again with a fresh mind a few days later.
You see, it is far more useful to write some outstanding content sometimes and decent content the rest of the time, then to write pretty good content all of the time. Why? Because outstanding content will get shared far more often and that is something that is also vital for SEO, as search engines now look at how often your content gets shared, as well as how often it gets back-linked to.
So take your time on a really great idea. Do the research, write the right content, perhaps even get somebody else to look at it. Because unless youâve got a massive following, you wonât be able to get all of your articles ranking highly for SEO.
Instead, you should focus on making sure that some (or even one) do.
About the Author: Janet Anthony is a blogger from Kansas City who has been writing professionally for five years now. She mostly writes about blogging, social media, and SEO. Her motto is âWhat you do today can improve all your tomorrowsâ. Find Janet here:Â Twitter. You can read her article Avoid the common mistakes in writing.
Host Bloggerâs Commentary:
Readers, please share this post. Many bloggers and website creators find SEO confusing. Janet explained how to improve your search engine rankings so you can increase your organic traffic in understandable terms.
How do you improve your search engine traffic? Is it a goal of yours? What is your favorite keyword tool? I look forward to your views in the comments section.
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