Your Complete Guide to SEO Success in Your Blogs
Writing SEO-friendly blogs is important.
Conform to the search engine’s wishes and you’ve a much higher chance of increasing your organic traffic.
Your writing will improve and your blogs will be easier to read too.
If this post is a little jargon-heavy refer to our SEO glossary.
Use short descriptive URLs
Your blogs need to be easy to get to – it’ll help you bring direct traffic through to your site.
Simplicity, as in so many instances, is key.
There are a few things you always need to remember when optimising your URLs:
- Include your keywords
- Match your URL to titles (where it makes sense to)
- Use hyphens to separate words
- Remove stop words if the URL looks too long (stop words include: ‘and’, ‘but’, ‘the’ etc.)
Make sure a user can understand your page’s topic from looking at the URL.
If you do this, you’ll have more success.
Target the right keywords
Your keywords are massively important.
Before you begin writing your blog, think about what it is about and choose a small number of keywords to use throughout your post.
This is so that when Google’s bots scour your page, they can determine what it is about and for which searches to show it on their search engine.
Identify the keywords you feel are most relevant and include them in your title, meta description, subheadings and lead paragraph.
Use a keyword research tool to help you figure out which keywords are likely to be most effective.
Use long-tail keywords
Long-tail keywords help the search engine rank you for more specific topics.
They add context to your content and they’re what people are actually searching for.
Users rarely use broad search terms – they tend to be much more precise.
Take a look over a list of your recent searches. It’s likely you’ll see many of your searches consisting of three or more words.
Identify some of the longer keyword phrases you think your business should be ranking for.
Make sure these terms exist in your copy frequently enough that Google will notice and begin displaying your pages for them.
Write a meta description
The meta description summarises your page’s content.
It should be between 50-160 characters.
If Google displays the meta description, and it’s written correctly, it will positively impact your CTR (click-through-rate). This in-turn boosts your SEO.
Write to be compelling and include keywords – all this entices the user to click through to your page.
To add or amend a meta description, you would need to change your website code.
Generally (on a PC), you should right click on the relevant webpage and go to view page source.
Ctrl + F to search and type meta name. Find the “meta name” tag and description then you can change this accordingly in the appropriate files on your server.
Consider keyword distribution
Are your keywords distributed evenly and frequently throughout the piece?
Aim to include them regularly so that Google knows you haven’t strayed from your topic.
Keeping on topic is one way of showing Google that what you’ve written is a high-quality piece of content.
You mustn’t overdo it though.
This is called keyword stuffing and is when you over-saturate your blog with key terms to try and fool the search engine.
Once upon a time this might have worked but nowadays it’ll hinder your page’s authority if you try and stuff your post with keywords.
Google doesn’t like people trying to con them.
Write naturally and sensibly and you won’t hinder your SEO.
RELATED: SEO Glossary and Acronyms
Use outbound links
When conducting research for your blog, have you come across any useful articles that your readers might benefit from seeing too?
If so, link to them.
Offering the reader the most value will work in your favour.
Don’t sell them short by worrying that they’ll leave your site.
When adding the link make sure it opens a new tab when using the link.
Building your credibility as a knowledgeable resource is a powerful marketing tool.
Offer the highest value possible to the reader.
Use frequent subheadings
This makes it easier to reader for the user.
Breaking up your content is necessary to keep them on track – there’s nothing worse than being faced with a thick block of text and this helps to break your writing up into concise chunks of relevant information.
Subheadings are another opportunity to include your keywords in your copy too.
Consider sentence length
Keep your sentences short and snappy – and to the point.
Readers get lost in long sentences and shorter sentences are easier to follow.
Google pays a lot of attention to readability – if your text is hard to read it’ll hinder how Google rates your page.
By making sure your sentences don’t drag on, you keep the reader interested.
Being concise means you’ll avoid waffling and driving your readers away.
Add image alts
Similar to the meta description, but this tells the search engine what your image is and what it’s about.
As the search engine cannot interpret an image outright, this is the information they use.
The bots will index your image based on what is said here.
Make sure all the images you use are relevant to the topic, and try to include your keywords within the description.
When optimising your blog posts, do all these things and you increase your chances of ranking highly.
The search engines appreciate and reward high quality content.
You have to make sure you’re giving the highest value you can to the reader.
This includes how well the article reads and how easy it is for them to find.
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