Aside from appealing to your customers, it’s important to appeal to search engines as well so further more people can know about the good work you do. You need to make sure that your page rank is high because most online users usually just keep to the first two pages of search results.
So, how do you achieve this?
- When you set up your blog, if you’re creating it to complement your main website, typically, you would want to set it up on a sub-directory or your main domain. For example: yourdomain.com/blog/. There are three main advantages when you do that. 1) With each blog article, you’re adding fresh content to the root domain; 2) You can also add deep links from other websites and social media to your root domain while you promote your blog articles; 3) As a result of the above two reasons, you will also be increasing your domain authority.
- Keep your URL structure straightforward (match it with the blog post’s title) and meaningful (include the focus keyword in the URL). Search engines must be able to tell what the post talks about just by the URL. Also, avoid alphanumeric blocks as much as possible.
- When creating a blog post title, include one main keyword and focus on making the rest enticing by adding a high impact adjective and a number for the “value“ provided by the post. Take a cue from newspaper and magazine headlines.
- Aid search engines in understanding where idea breakpoints exist in the blog post by formatting subheaders as H2 and H3. Subheaders improve user experience by making the post much easier to read.
- Also from an SEO standpoint, making your keyword appear early in the content helps a great deal. So, be sure place your keyword in the first or second or third sentence of your blog post.
- Include internal and external links to your blog posts. Internal links are good from an SEO standpoint because they help rank particular pages that you’re linking to. As for external links, these help improve UX and reinforce the validity of the statements in your post. Three to five quality links in a post are recommended.
- Add images to posts. Every post should have a supporting image and it’s best to use an original one. Images are great for SEO; studies even reveal that blog posts or articles with images get 94 percent more views. Just think about how you normally read newspapers; aren’t you more drawn to those that come with an image and read them first? It’s basically the same principle with blogging. And, when you incorporate an image to your blog post, make sure to choose a size that works really well with your blog. Don’t forget to add an ALT tag because search engines can’t read images.
- Sporadically change your content presentation. A visual format always does well SEO-wise. Infographics, for example, always have a solid performance in terms of SEO and UX. Studies reveal that publishers who use infographics grow in traffic an average of 12 percent more than those who don’t. Videos as well are worthy of consideration because they rake in traffic (online users spend 100 percent more time on page with videos) and boost page rankings.
These are proven effective ways on how to make search engines love your blog. They’re all very easy to implement and if you’re consistent with all of these, you can expect much better SEO performance for your blog posts.
I hope you enjoy these tips and wish you a lot of success with your blog. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or comments.
Until next time, this is Manuel Gil del Real (MGR)