Writing a blog post is certainly a skill. Not everybody can do that. However, writing a good post is not enough. You need to write it with two main purposes in mind: appease your audience and cater to search engines’ rules and regulations.
For some people, writing to attract people and writing for SEO are two completely different terms. However, the truth is that you can write high-quality blog posts that are both attractive to search engines, from a SEO standpoint, and offer real value to your readers.
To greatly improve your SEO rankings, you need to implement the following techniques. Follow these techniques and enjoy long-lasting success in search engines rankings.
To start off, you need to create a blog post that covers important topics your audience looks for online. You should write about trends, hot topics and industry questions.
In order to find exactly what topics are hot, you have to conduct a throughout investigation. Use tools like Google Trends, Trendsmap, YouTube Trends and BuzzFeed for that.
For instance, if you choose to write a post about interior design, you can select as a main keyword “living room design”. As secondary keywords, you should choose “modern living room design”, “living room design inspiration” and vintage living room design”.
Your keywords together with your LSI keywords (latent semantic index) should be included in your title, body (aim for keyword density of around 1-2%), URLs and meta description.
Your blog post title is probably the most important part of your SEO effort. Obviously, your content needs to be properly optimized, but if your title is not written from a SEO perspective, then your efforts are futile.
The title of your post appears in search engines, along with the meta tag. Make sure you keep it under 70 characters long and that it has the main keyword included in it.
From a SEO standpoint, your blog post needs to be meta optimized. This does not refer only to your title and meta description, but also to alt tags and calls to action.
Your meta description should include vital information about your post and should explain your readers why they should visit your post. Additionally, you need to include as many secondary and LSI keywords as possible.
You should also add alt tags to each one of your images to ensure they appear in search engine rankings, under the image category. To figure out if whether an image has an alt tag attached to it, simply hover your mouse over it. A small box with text will appear if the image is properly optimized.
The alt text is search related, so your image could appear for each one of the keywords optimized. For search engines to interpret what an image is about, you need to use the alt tag.
Alt tags are extremely important for SEO and could let you enjoy a huge boost of organic traffic.
According to a recent Google study, over 61% of mobile visitors will keep searching for a mobile website until it is mobile optimized (https://googlemobileads.blogspot.ro/2012/09/mobile-friendly-sites-turn-visitors.html). Mobile friendly sites have 50% more chances to turn visitors into customers.
The same applies to your blog. If your blog is responsive, people who access your blog from their tablets or smartphones will be able to easily navigate your pages.
You’ve probably heard before Matt Cutts and other SEO gurus say that you should avoid duplicate content at all costs. However, sometimes you need to display the same text in order to help your website visitors to navigate easier.
If you have duplicate content on your site but you have to keep both of the locations live, that’s when you need to use canonical tags. A canonical tag tells the search engine that you want to index just a certain page.
Using canonical tags is quite easy. Just remember the URL of the page you want to index, then go to all duplicate pages and add this code: <link rel=”canonical” href-“insert here the URL of the page you want to index”/>
The URL structure of your site should make it simple for your visitors to connect with you and navigate around. Google and other search engines favor blogs that include blog posts that are connected for ease of reading.
In other words, you should create a section for each blog post, enabling readers to easily navigate your blog. To find out more about how a simple URL structure can give you a huge boost in the eyes of Google, check out this article on Moz: https://moz.com/learn/seo/url.
Not only your readers will appreciate internal links, but search engines will love you for that. If you have written a post which has similar information to another post you have written a few months ago, do not hesitate to link to the latter.
A good internal linking structure will show you as authoritative in the eyes of Google. Here is a great article that explains everything about internal linking and cornerstone content: https://yoast.com/cornerstone-content-rank/.
One of the easiest ways to improve your blog’s SEO rankings and make Google fall in love with your blog posts is to leverage the power of social media to improve the reach of your content.
Add a share button at the end of each blog post and use free tools such as Hootsuite to connect all of your accounts. Social media is becoming increasingly important, not just from a user perspective, but also from a SEO perspective.
People who are searching for a certain term might find your article right on Facebook or discover a photo from your blog on Instagram. Not to mention Twitter, which is rated very high in search engines.
Lastly, in order to get better SEO rankings with your blog posts, you should capitalize on the benefits of SEO plugins. Yoast WordPRess, Google XML Sitemaps and W3 Total Cache are some of the best plugins you can use to boost your blog’s SEO rankings.
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