Optimise Your Blog Posts For Search Engines With These 6 Easy Steps

Blogging is one of the most important parts of a successful digital strategy. There is a tremendous amount of SEO opportunity with every blog you post.

Written by

Amanda Lucas

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BlogContinued Success
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Blogging is one of the most important pieces of a successful online marketing campaign. There is a tremendous amount of SEO opportunity with every blog you post, so be sure to best optimise your content for search engines. The following post explains how you can do this in six easy steps.

Writing blog posts is one of the best components of a successful content marketing campaign. A new blog post enhances the credibility of your website in so many ways:

  • Every time you write a new blog post, you create a new indexed page for your website.
  • You also are creating relevant information for people to share on social media.
  • The more your blog links travel around the social-sphere, the more traffic you get to your website.
  • Having so many visitors to your blog page (even if that’s the only page they visit) increases brand awareness for your company name and blog.

With all this SEO potential floating around your blog, you definitely want to make sure that you pay attention to critical areas of the page as you post.

Making sure that your blog post is optimised for search engines will only help you in your quest to dominate the internet (casual) and increase brand awareness for your company.

Here is a handy list of SEO points to touch when posting your blog:

1. Select a focus keyword (or keywords) for your post

Pick the main topic for your blog and mention it in the page title, throughout the content of the copy, the URL and in the meta description (if possible).

If you need to pick more than one focus keyword, that’s fine too – just don’t go overboard. For example, my focus keywords for this blog entry are “SEO” and “Search Engines”.

However, it’s really important that you do not keyword stuff your content.

If the focus keywords don’t naturally fit into these areas of your post, don’t force it.

2. Pay attention to character limits

For the page title, do not exceed 70 characters. In the meta description, don’t go over 150 characters. This includes spaces. Search engines only show this number of characters, so it’s best to keep them simple and to-the-point so that your readers can easily tell what the page is about.

3. Add internal links

If you are writing and you reference an older blog entry or a service that you provide, create an internal link to those pages. This creates more “link juice” on your website.

4. Add an image

People love pictures, so do search engines. Add an image, and be sure to add an alt text to the image. Alt text for images can be up to 125 characters, but I recommend keeping it to 6 words or less. Include that focus keyword if it describes the image well.

5. Check out the URL

A lot of blogs will auto generate a URL based on the title of your blog posts. Take a look at it and make sure that it has a keyword in it if possible. Search engines take a close look at URLs, so you should too.

6. Add a Meta description

Meta descriptions are valuable to the human who is looking for your page. They provide a brief description of the page so they user can have a better idea of what the page is about. Write 1-2 sentences about your blog entry, include the focus keyword if possible, and boom! You’ve got your Meta description.

Bonus! One last marketing tip for blogs: add a CTA (call to action) to your blog – such as the one featured below.

If you don’t nudge your readers to take action once they’ve read your blog, it’s just a dead end.

Give your blog readers a place to go after they’ve read all of your interesting tips, facts and news.

 

CONCLUSION

Following these few steps when posting a blog post can greatly help your site’s SEO and increase organic visibility. Be sure to share that blog post at least twice on social media sites and include them in your email blasts so that you attract more visits to your website, boost your social media program and hopefully acquire new signups.

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