If your business website has a blog, you are off to a great start and you obviously understand the importance of business blogging. If you do not have one by now – make sure to start one asap! Sadly, so many businesses fail to take advantage of the enormous marketing potential of their blogs. Having a blog on your business website can increase traffic – which means more sales for you! But do you know how to optimize your blog posts to make them more search engine friendly (and drive that traffic)?
Here are 5 Quick + Actionable SEO Tips To Optimize Your Business’s Blog Posts!
- Add content to your website on a regular basis: According to Blogger: roughly 60% of businesses have blogs, however – 65% of those blogs haven’t been updated in the past year! In order to truly benefit from blogging on your business website, you need to be providing fresh, relevant content and performing basic blog post optimization! Content is what search engine spiders look for and index to show up in the search results. Without content, there’s nothing to index or rank. Pretty simple, right? This is also why flash websites are not SEO friendly. All of the text is encoded in a way that isn’t just simple text and is therefore unreadable for these spiders.
- 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. Chrome extensions like Keywords Everywhere allow you to find keywords related to your topic. You can also use search terms in places like the Googles search bar, Pinterest search bar, and YouTube search – as these will also self-populate with terms people are searching for regarding the search you start typing!
- Utilize keywords throughout your post: Once you have targeted a couple of valuable, relevant keywords, 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
NOTE: Don’t fill your content with so many keywords that it becomes difficult or irritating to read. You also want to avoid getting penalized by Google by overdoing it. 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 (instead of uploading it as “img_001.jpg”) and fill out the alternate text field with a brief, keyword rich description of the photo.
- Use a plugin like Yoast: Yoast is a very helpful SEO plugin that can really help step up your SEO game! The best part – it’s user-friendly and all stages – beginner or expert SEO! Yoast does a great job of letting you know if your post is SEO friendly or if there are any actions you can take to change it and make it better.
Yes- taking the time before (and while) writing each blog post to make use of these 5 actionable SEO tips can really help boost your business’s blog. Is there a quick tip that maybe you realized you were missing from your SEO strategy?
As always, if you need assistance with SEO, we can help! Feel free to contact us!