You are creating quality content; yet, there is little to no traffic coming to your website. Your friend’s blog is performing way better, and you can’t help but get a little envious. She doesn’t seem to be doing anything different from you, so what gives? Here’s how to optimize your blog post for SEO.
Setting up your blog and creating content for it without including SEO is pretty much like setting up a party without sending out invites
SEO is an effective method of digital marketing that increases the visibility of your website. In other words, SEO are the invites that optimize your blog, so that people get to know about it.
If you are a blogger, you’ve probably heard about the importance of SEO. Yet, you haven’t completely wrapped your head around the concept. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps your content rank higher on an organic search result to help drive traffic.
In other words, optimizing your blog posts for SEO helps them perform better on all major search engines. Yet, how can one do this? Below we take a look at the top ways to optimize your blog post for SEO.
Keyword Research
The first to a successful SEO strategy is familiarizing yourself with the keywords your audience is interested in. To do this, you’ll have to do your research and see how those keywords can fit into your content. Ensure that the keywords you choose are related to the content in question.
Tips to keep in mind:
- Use Jaaxy: Jaaxy is a tool that helps generate keywords relevant to your content.
- Use long- tail keywords: By using long- tail keywords, you invest more in longer phrases that allow for specificity.
- Do not content overuse the keywords: Avoid overusing the keywords that you’ve picked out for your content. Also, do not force a keyword into a sentence. You could get penalized for this.
Choosing the Right Blogpost Title and Headlines
Your title is the attention catcher; it is what will make people want to read it. The same is true when it comes to Search Engines. Search engines focus on blog titles in an effort to understand its content.
Since you’ve already carried out your keyword research, you should have a keyword in mind. Ensure that you include it into the title naturally. Also, ensure that by adding the keyword, your title makes sense to both the readers and the search engines.
Using Keyword in URL
This is an important step that most bloggers are often unaware of and miss out on. Including your target keyword to your URL is just as important as adding it to your title. It helps the search engine learn what your content is about. The better the search engine understands your content, the better it will rank.
Image Text
You know how some bloggers ignore labeling their images? Yet, simply labeling them won’t do the trick. While filling out the title of your image as well as the alt text, be sure to use the target keyword. Do not be afraid to use long- tail keywords while doing so.
Internal and External Links
Ever wondered how bloggers get their websites to link to other websites? External links are when you link to another website or another website links to yours. These type of links are often viewed as third-party votes by search engines. This, in turn, increases your ranking power.
By making your page relevant, you stand a high chance of having websites link to you. Also, always structure your content appropriately. Using internal links helps as well. You will notice that this post have a few internal links – I’d love for you to stay put on my site and keep reading 🙂
Internal links lead back to one of your previous posts on your website. You can do this by using anchor texts. Be sure to not overuse internal links on a single page. Moreover, ensure that your links lead back to helpful and relevant information.
Tags and Categories
Tags and categories are methods that aid in organizing and putting together similar posts. Whilst selecting the keyword and tag to use, ensure that it is relevant to your readers.
Tags and categories are just as important for SEO optimization as it to your readers. They help your readers find relevant and useful information easier and faster.
Hopefully you got some value of these tips on how to optimize your blog post for SEO. If you have any quetsions, feel free to reach out any time. You can reach me daily on Karina, or feel free to leave a comment below.
Have a super day, and I look forward to hearing from you
cheers
Karina
Some great points made here. As bloggers we don’t often think too much about SEO, we simply write and think that people will find our content automatically.
This is fine if you don’t want visitors or you don’t want to make money from your blog, but if not keyword research is essential. Otherwise you blog will be lost in internet oblivion and no one will find it, just like a small shop tucked away in a mall where no one walks past.
Jaaxy is also my keyword tool of choice, and this just makes the whole keyword process a lot easier than going the other routes. For people who don’t like doing keyword research, Jaaxy is the quickest and easiest way to get this job done.
Hi Michel,
Thanks for the comments and insights, I really appreciate it.
Have a super day!
cheers
Karina
Hi! Karina! Yeah, SEO is so important. And as we’re starting it could be neglected and passed over. I have a couple of sites and am still struggling with traffic. I greatly appreciate the recommendations you have given here. Especially, using target keywords for the text of our images (better if they are long tail). This has been something I’ve been ignoring.
I like the analogy of the party. Not paying attention to SEO, is like throwing a party and not sending invitations. Thank you very much for this post!
Hi Henry, thanks for reading and taking the time to comment – legend! 🙂
I didn’t pay too much attention to target keywords on my images at the start either, so I’m going through the process of optimizing old posts at the moment
thanks again – and have a super day!
cheers
Karina
Hi Karina, thank you for such as great little article it is actually just what I needed having spent the last few months producing quality content and not really tinking about my SEO. I love your analogy about having a party and not sending invites, brilliant! The one thing this has highlighted to me is my images. I’ve just been giving them a basic title and not linking in to my keywords so my job for the next few days is to go back and amend them. Thanks so much!
you and me both 🙂 Thanks for reading and taking the time to comment – super!
cheers
Karina
Hi Karina,
I have been running my own blogs for about 12 to 15 years now. I think I have about 15 websites in total.
You are absolutely right when you discuss keyword research being the key to success.
When someone is online searching, they use search engine with keywords to find the content they are looking for.
In order for a search engine to share your site, there has to be a connect between you and the searcher and this connect is the keyword.
SEO is a slow process though and a blogger will probably find that they have slow results initially.
Consistency and giving value is key.
The keyword is the trigger, but it is your content that will get you the results you want.
Google talk about ‘Micro-Moments’ that happen to a prospective buyer. There are 4 micro-moments. Your keyword research must be in alignment with these 4 moment
Your content has to be amazing when compared to an alternative blog. If you can’t provide the best experience for your visitor they will go elsewhere.
Your tips will go a long way helping your readers get noticed.
Great job!
Tim
Hi Tim,
Thanks so much for your comprehensive and insightful feedback – love it!
cheers
Karina
A really informative post, All these steps are critical to keeping the search engines happy. All the great content in the world doesn’t matter if noone sees it, its the old if a tree falls in the woods. As an aspiring blogger myself, i try to implement each of the steps in your article, but its nice to see them laid out and explained so elegantly.
Thanks for the great article.
Thanks for the lovely feedback Mike! If you are new to blogging and looking to learn as much as possible, I recommend you check out Wealthy Affiliate as your learning platform – you can read my review and details here.
Have a super day!
cheers
Karina