Get the Most SEO Value Out of Blog Posts
Blogging is a great way to attract the attention of target audience members. Consumers are looking for information online and the more information that you can give them, the better. Informational blog posts help to establish a business as a trusted source. When it comes time to buy a product or hire a service provider, it’s likely that blog readers will go with the company that they are most comfortable with. A business blog can generate this kind of confidence. The primary purpose of business blogging should be to provide information to target audience members, but we can’t forget about the SEO potential of blogging. Each blog post is a new page of content that is filled with opportunities.
Here are ways to ensure that each blog post is helping to improve SEO:
Select keywords to target
One of the first steps of an SEO campaign is to conduct keyword research for every page of the site. Depending on the size of the site, that could be hundreds of potential keywords that are relevant to the site. Obviously you can’t target them all on the main pages of the website. However, this list can be used when creating blog posts. Utilize keywords that weren’t selected the first time around on the priority pages but still generate a healthy search volume. This strategy will also ensure that it keeps the keyword targeting natural. You don’t want to target the same keywords over and over and you especially don’t want to use them as anchor text over and over.
Write optimized titles
Perhaps the most important element of a blog post for SEO purposes is the title. It’s what gets crawled and indexed first by the search spiders and is the first thing that searchers notice in the SERP. The title should include the primary keyword that is being targeted in the post. Of course, you don’t want to just title the post whatever the keyword is. “Keyword Research” is a pretty boring blog post title. Instead, write a title that reflects search behavior. “How to” posts are a great example. Many searches begin with “how to”. Start typing “how to” and the keyword that you are targeting into the Google search box to get some ideas.
Utilize an SEO plugin
There are plenty of plugins that assist you with the optimization of a post. Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress is a great example. Each post has an understandable format that includes sections for the title tag, the description, and the keyword tag. Based on the keyword that you are targeting, it will grade your blog post to let you know how well the post has been optimized so that you can make some tweaks to improve it.
Interlink between posts
Take advantage of all of the opportunities that a blog post provides. If someone lands on your post, ideally you’d like them to visit other pages of the site too. Encourage this behavior by including a link within the blog post. The link could be to a product or service page or to another blog post that you wrote on a related topic. The goal is to keep a visitor on the site as long as possible.
Categorized in: SEO
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