Blog SEO: How to Optimise Your Blog Content

If you’re a marketer, Search Engine Optimisation is important. When you optimise your web pages and blog posts, you are making your website more visible to the likes of Google and other search engines when searching a specific keyword.

With Google’s constant algorithm updates, it can be hard to stay at the top of your chosen keywords. Therefore, it’s best to constantly update your website and make it better than your competitors.

In this post, we will cover how to optimise your blog posts for the keywords that you care about, with a few other optimisation tactics that you could potentially use.

How to Optimise Your Blog Content

Focus on 1-2 long-tail keywords

When optimising your posts, don’t incorporate too many keywords. This could actually hurt your SEO because search engines will think that you’re including loads with the sole purpose of gaining a high rank in a search.

It is best to use keywords that relate to your content in a way that isn’t forced. Use only one or two per blog post as this will help keep you focused on a goal for your post. Using long-tail keywords may be more efficient as the person searching is obviously looking for something very specific. By using these kinds of keywords, more qualified users will visit your website, which is the kind of traffic that you need.

Include 1-2 keywords in the post content

There are four essential places where you should try to include your keywords: the headline, headers and body, URL, and meta description. Doing this will help show search engines that the content is relevant to the keywords you chose, meaning your ranking will be higher.

Headline

The headline of your blog post will be a search engines and reader’s first step in determining the relevancy of your content, so including a keyword here is vital.

It’s also best to not have a lengthy title, if possible. It’s recommended to keep it up to about 65 characters, as that is where Google cuts off the text. I would recommend including your keyword near the beginning of the post headline, so that users can see straight away what the post is about and search engines can see that it’s relevant to the post.

Headers and Body

Mention your keyword(s) at a normal cadence throughout the body of your post and in the headers. The best way to incorporate your keywords into a post is to think about what keywords you want to use for your post before writing, and then include the keywords throughout the post in a reader-friendly way. Don’t use the keyword too much as your blog SEO will more than likely not improve.

The main focus when writing a post however should be on what matters to your audience, not how many times you can include the keyword in the content you are creating. It’s best to focus on helping the reader and answering the question they might have asked to arrive on your post. If you can do that, you will usually find that you naturally optimise for important keywords anyway.

URL

Search engines look to your URL to figure out what your post is about. You can optimise your URL, therefore you should. Include your keyword in the URL on every post that you’re publishing and that will help improve the SEO for your blog.

Meta Description

Your meta description is important to give search engines and readers information about your blog posts content. Therefore, you should include your keyword so Google and your audience know what your post contains. The meta description helps with click rates so it is important that your meta description is engaging in order to get more traffic to your website.

Make sure your blog is mobile-friendly

A long time ago, Google revealed that more people use the search engine on their mobile phones than on desktop. Since this is the case, the mobile-friendly websites come up on SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) first.

Responsive design and mobile-friendly websites have always been important for user experience, but they’re becoming more and more important for SEO too. In order to keep traffic coming to your website and blog, it’s important that you prioritize improving your mobile experience.

It may be worth subscribing to Google’s official blog to keep on top of Google updates and changes to the algorithm and what search engines value.

Optimise Your Images

When creating a blog post, make sure that you have images in mind for it. Search engines look for images, and more importantly, they look for optimised images. Simply adding ‘Alt Text’ to your image can help improve the SEO for your blog posts. Also, making sure that your images are a good size for your website, so that your website runs quickly and responsive is important. To find out which images need optimising on your website and blog, use Google PageSpeed Insights and analyse your website.

Search engines technically can’t actually “see” the image, so the image alt text tells them what the image is about. This helps so that these images can be found when users search. It’s also worth actually adding a keyword into the alt text, it won’t help you SEO a major amount, but it’s still worth doing just for that extra little push.

Topic Tags

Topic tags can help organise your blog content, but don’t make a bunch of tags with similar names as Google may penalize you for having duplicate content. For example, topic tags like “website”, “web” and “web blog” are too similar to one another to be used on the same post.

I would recommend creating about 15-25 topic tags that you think are important to your blog and aren’t too similar to each other, and then only tag your posts with those keywords. Then you won’t have to worry about duplicate content.

Link Internally when Possible

Inbound links to your content help show search engines the validity or relevancy of your content. The same goes for linking internally to other pages on your website. For example, we like to put a call-to-action at the bottom of our posts so that people can contact us for more information or help.

It is worth linking anything that you mention in your post that could potentially link to another page. Using internal links will help improve your SEO, and get your blog more traffic.

Use Google’s Search Console

Google’s free Search Console contains a section called the Search Analytics Report. This report helps you analyse clicks from Google Search, and it’s useful to determine which keywords people are using to find your blog posts. Use Google’s official support page to help you learn how to use it.

If you are just starting to get blog posts out, or you have a lot of posts out but haven’t optimised them how I have mentioned in this post then it’s likely your blog posts aren’t ranking very well. Your blog posts won’t start ranking instantly, but if you use all these tips consistently and frequently then you will begin to receive the traffic you want.