Best SEO Practices for Your Blog Content

SEO and Getting traffic to your blog is a very important part of blogging . It is said that “content is king”, but there is really no point of writing awesome original content if you cannot get it in front of your target audience. This is why search engine optimization remains a most important factor in successful blogging.

Getting search engine traffic from search engines like Google, Bing, and Ask etc. is also preferred when dealing with the popular ad server: Google AdSense.

Below are highlighted SEO practices that you should implement to get more exposure for your blog and search engine audience for your content.

Focus on 1 – 2 Long tail Keywords

Most bloggers have this belief that incorporating loads of keywords into a single blog post would make the search engine take notice of their blog, yes it would but negatively as that would be keyword stuffing and that would ultimately hurt your SEO.

A good rule of thumb is to keep focus on a single or two keywords per post, this practice would additionally help you as a writer to stay focused on the primary goal you have preset for your blog post.

It is also advised to make use of long-tail keywords as this will lead to more conversions of visitors as they mostly use long-tail search terms on search engines.

Make Inclusion of These Keywords in Strategic Parts of your Blog post

After identifying the long-term keywords you wish to make use of in your blog post, it is important to include these keyword in strategic parts of your post. There are essentially 4 places where your keywords should be included i.e.

Your Title: Your keyword should be included within the first 65 words of your blog post headline, this point is close to where Google cuts off on SERPs (search engine results pages). So if your blog post has very long titles (it is advised to be as short as possibele), it is advised that your keyword falls between the first 65 characters.

Headers and Body: Your keyword should be mentioned casually throughout the body of your post and in the headers, it should not be forced into your sentences as this clustering will lead to a bad reader experience, simply sprinkle your keyword adequately across your blogpost and headers.

URL: Search engine algorithm checks out your URL to identify what your blog post is about, your URL is the first item that is crawled on your page. So it is important that your blog post URL includes your keywords

Meta Description: Meta description are used to explain both to the search engine as well as your audience what your post content is about making it important that you include your keywords when writing your meta description

Ensure the Mobile Friendliness and Load Speed of Your Blog

Over the years, with the emergence of smartphones, a larger percentage of website audience are from mobile devices. Therefore keeping your blog mobile friendly goes a long way in getting and keeping new audience. If your website is not mobile optimized and does not load fast, audience will likely leave after less than 5 seconds.

Optimize your Blog Post Images

Images speaks louder than words, when writing blog posts it is important to put related images as this will attract the audience to your blog post. However, search engine cannot identify images, so you have to help the algorithm out by including alt text to any image you put alongside your writing.

Alt text describes what these images are to search engine algorithm so they can identify them and direct traffic of related search.

Link Internally to Other Blog posts

When you write a new blog post, it is important to link back to old posts that offer relevance to your new topic. This would not only positively affect your bounce rate but also your search engine rank.