Whether your blog is your website or you are wondering how to start an SEO friendly blog on your website, learning how to optimize your blog for SEO is key if you want to get traffic from search engines like Google & Bing. Whether you are a large business, small business or solopreneur, search engine traffic is vital to ensuring that your business is operating in the 21st century. Every business has a website and every good business shows up on the first page of search.
When you are optimizing your blog, you need to make sure that you are not compromising the function and user experience. If you are writing content that is clearly cumbersome because you are trying to reach your optimal keyword density, you are missing the mark. Let’s go on to look at how to best optimize your blog for the serps.
1. Focus On Long Tail Keywords That Match Your Reader’s Intent
While you do want to put your keywords throughout your blog post, you most want to make sure that you answer your visitor’s query. Do they feel satisfied after reading your blog post or are they more confused than before they read the post? You want to make sure that your reader’s experience comes before any keywords. Remember that one of the SEO factors is how long a user spends on the site. There are no doubt other ways to figure out how useful a visitor found your site.
Focusing on 1 or 2 long tail keywords will allow you to rank for these keywords, without bombarding the reader with keywords. Long tail keywords are good for your blog because the people that type in these sort of searches are usually further along in the search process which means you are getting someone that is further through the buying cycle. If you can help them onto your mailing list, it is likely to take them a much shorter time to buy than if they were at the beginning of their research.
2. Ensure You Are Including Your Keywords In the Important Parts
When you are optimizing for your keyword, you need to make sure the search engines know what your site is about. This is why you should put your keyword in the title of your blog post as well as in the meta data for your keywords. When you use images, you should work your keyword into the alt tag of the photo. You should also include your keyword in your headers and within the body of your text. Make sure that you text is long enough so that your keyword density isn’t too high.
Search engines look through every part of your site. This includes your post URL, so make sure that you optimize it. You don’t want to leave it too long so that it is difficult for people to read it come in search results, but make sure that it has your keyword in it. Your meta description (what shows up in the search snippets) should also have your keyword.
3. Do Not Overdo Topic Tags
If you think that stuffing a lot of keywords in your topic tags is going to help your search engine rankings, you may hurt yourself more than you help yourself. Topic tags can make it look like you have duplicate content on your site and give you a penalty. If you have a tool like SEO Yoast, you can go in and disable topic tags from being indexed, but if you were hoping to get extra points in SEO, that wouldn’t help you either. It’s better to leave the topic tags off unless you are using them to organize your content.
4. Make Sure Your Site Is Mobile Optimized
Most people’s sites are mobile responsive, but there are still some sites that are not mobile friendly and this can sink your ability to rank in the search engines since over half of people view websites on their phones. Google displays mobile friendly search results before other search results so it is increasingly important to optimize your site design for mobile as well
If you want to keep your current design and platform, you usually can find a web developer that can make your current website mobile. If you want to do things in an easier manner, you might want to transfer your site to a platform like WordPress which has plenty of mobile responsive themes.
Conclusion
Getting your blog optimized for SEO may seem complicated in the beginning, but once you understand why you are doing certain actions, it will all start to come together and you will be able to make sense of it all. Learning how to do SEO for your blog is an important part of driving traffic to your site. Search engine traffic is almost passive traffic unlike social media traffic where you are continually having to promote, promote, promote in hopes that your blog post is going to go viral.
SEO is a powerful skill in this digital age and the people that know how to do it are going to get the lion’s share of traffic from search engines like Google and Bing. Make sure you are optimizing each blog post and any past blog posts so you don’t miss out on any traffic.
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