5 Tips for Optimizing your Blog Posts for SEO
If you’re writing consistent blog posts someone has surely mentioned that you need to be sure you optimize them for SEO.
What?
I get it. Most writers aren’t up to date on what it will require to properly optimize for the search engines. For that matter, most SEOs aren’t either, but that’s another post.
The fact is that optimizing your blog posts will help them find a wider audience, and rank better in the search engines, particularly Google. But how to do that? Here’s 5 tips that can help your blog posts enter the blogosphere ready for action.
5 Must-do blog optimization tips
1. Do some keyword research – Search engines operate via keywords. If they don’t know what keywords you are targeting, you might not show up for the terms you hope to be found for. Make this easy by identifying these and a few secondary terms prior to writing your post, so you’ll be prepared to use them in the title, body and tags of your post.
2. Shorter, more visual content – People skim web pages and in spite of the fact that this is your baby, they will skim here too. Help make your content more readable by breaking up any long blocks of text into shorter paragraphs, and adding interesting visuals.
3. Great headlines and subheads – The best way to get readers to read your entire post and engage with you is to use enticing, yet true headlines and subheads. This will rope in the unsuspecting skimmer we referenced above and get them to read the entire thing. A side benefit is that it makes it simpler to organize and write the post to begin with.
4. Make them social – Enable social sharing buttons on your blog, and encourage their use. You never know who’s going to read your post and Tweet it to their zillions of followers.
5. Use a responsive design – These days over half of all web traffic is first read on a mobile device. If you are not using a responsive design for mobile, then you’re going to miss out on roughly half your possible audience. Nuff said?