SEO Best Practices for Blogs
Question: How can you get more organic traffic to your website?
Answer: Blog content.
By implementing SEO best practices for your blog content, you’re providing a steady stream of traffic to your website.
So what are those best practices, and how can you introduce them to your blog?
Research & Target Keywords
Keyword targeting and research play a huge part in the success of a blog post.
Research has shown you can improve your conversion rate by almost 12.7% if you include words that trigger emotions. This is important to consider when implementing your research.
Each blog should be structured around the keywords you’d like to rank for and, ideally, these are long-tail keywords. Use your long-tail keyword within the title and in one of your H2 headings. The title should summarize the overall value of your blog in a clear and interesting way.
When writing your title, it is essential to include your main targeted keyword within the first 60 characters. That’s where Google draws the limit on their SERP.
There are several plug-ins available that can help analyze and optimize your titles. For WordPress, MonsterInsights has a built-in analyzer, or you can use tools like IsItWP.
When writing your blog post, your keywords should appear organically throughout the piece. You should be able to summarize the point of a paragraph in one sentence.
Include one or two targeted keywords per paragraph. This enables the page to rank for more, while still appearing organic.
Link to Internal Posts
Google prioritizes pages with more inbound links, especially pages that are referenced by third-party sites. This shows the search engine the validity and relevancy of your content.
The same applies for internal links on your site. Not only does it improve the SEO value of your current blog, but also the piece you’ve written previously. Plus, it has a knock-on effect of keeping traffic on your website. Again, this helps with SEO, as the more time end-users spend on your site, the more relevant the content seems to be.
A final benefit of including internal links is that it can help readers understand the relationships between different pieces of content while also driving new traffic to older blog posts.
Repurpose Existing Content
Updating existing content can increase the lifespan, especially if it’s evergreen. It also means you get to reap the benefits of your work over a longer period of time.
Linking to existing content improves the authority of your blog posts.
It is important to note that repurposing existing content and removing outdated content can comprise a key part of your blog site SEO strategy. This is because the creation of new content can take time to develop organically, so updating existing content could achieve results quicker than writing a fresh piece. This also has a knock-on effect of ranking SERP faster and improving the number of visitors.
Add Images & Videos
The algorithm for most search engines, and Google’s in particular, emphasizes engaging content. Images and video are a big part of this. Multimedia content achieves much more than plain text, while also providing the reader (and search engines) with contextual information around your content.
Adding images between paragraphs breaks up blocks of text and makes the post more aesthetically pleasing, but it also goes beyond that by improving the visibility of the page to search engines through keyword optimizable tags. Target keywords should be used in your image alt attribute and file names.
There are a few key elements for optimizing images for SEO.
The images must always be of high quality and an appropriate size. By reducing the image size, you can decrease page load times and improve visitor UX. This is key for SEO and bounce rates, as studies show that 1 in 4 visitors would abandon a website that takes more than four seconds to load. In a world where information is available almost instantly, very few people will wait for your site to load if they know the next link in the searches will be quicker to access.
Ultimately, providing relevant and engaging content is the key goal to any blog. These tips can help you push your content higher in the rankings so it’s in front of more people.
To find out more or to speak to one of our experts about support for your SEO strategy, please contact us.
