As a blogger, you probably already understand the importance of business blogging – but do you know how to optimize your blog content to rank on Google, and how to ensure that the on page SEO is optimized for each post you do?
“On Page” search engine optimization (SEO) and can really help get your blog or website noticed. Publishing regular blog posts gives you the opportunity to use many long-tail keywords, it keeps viewers on your website for longer, and it gives other websites something to link back to.
Many bloggers fail to take advantage of the huge potential that on page SEO optimization has on their blogs and websites. A study by blogger.com showed that although 60% of businesses own blogs, 65% of them haven’t updated their blogs in a year! This is a huge mistake – by providing new, relevant content, you can take advantage of the many marketing benefits blogging holds.
It’s important to get your blog up and running and to produce quality content, but you can make this go so much further by optimizing your blog to rank on Google. There are a few ways to go about doing this – read on to learn how to maximize SEO value of your blog content!
Keywords are the magic touch your content needs to show up in Google. You should have one or two primary keywords in mind for every post you write, alongside a few similar or related secondary keywords.
Keyword research is easy enough to do – you can check out sites such as:
It’s a must for any blogging strategy because it lets you work out the types of topics your audience desires. This is because, using the above keyword finders, you can see what your audience regularly searches in search engines like Google. You can also check out what your competition uses and see what words and phrases they are targeting to bring viewers to their blogs and websites.
The chances are, you naturally include keywords without even realizing because they are about your topic. However, simply finding out the keywords you need for your content and using them well optimizes your blog page.
You can use keywords throughout your blog post – place them where they will have maximum impact, for both human readers and search engine crawlers that index your content. The following spots are good:
Just make sure it is natural and not forced. Overusing keywords will not only annoy your readers, but search engines are intelligent enough to spot ‘keyword stuffing’ and can actually penalize you!
Moreover, since Google now uses LSI (latent semantic indexing) it’s less important to use exact keywords than it is to use synonyms or similar terms – as long as you have your keywords in mind and keep returning to them, whether using them or synonyms, you’ll be optimizing your blog content for search engines.
You may also want to try using ‘long-tail keywords’, which essentially means using longer phrases or questions in your posts. This is because one keyword or a two-word phrase is often very competitive, so your post won’t rank highly on Google or other search engines.
Along with long-tail keywords, try being more specific. That means making your keyword phrases exact: rather than writing ‘fishing’, try writing ‘Best Bait To Use To Catch Wide Mouth Bass’, for example.
Lastly, consider voice search. With more people than ever using Siri (iPhone) and Alexa (Google), optimizing your content for voice searches is a new development that you should think about. This means just simply thinking about what people might be more likely to say when they voice search than what they might type.
Be strategic with your keywords and watch your blog rank higher and higher on search engines!
Be aware of shoehorning keywords into a title, as ever – include them in a way that makes sense. Remember that using keywords has to be natural, as forcing them into titles and headings will just confuse your readers, and the clicks you lose from confused readers will not be made up by your SEO optimization!
Since your content will hopefully be covering the topic of your keywords, it shouldn’t be impossible to find a natural way to include your target keywords in your title!
Never forget to customize your URL before you publish – for example, a website on environmentally friendly light bulbs should have a URL like this for example: –
savetheplanet.org/eco-friendly-light-bulbs
Headings might also be a good spot to include secondary keywords or synonyms, to switch up your headings wording and avoid using the same keyword in every heading!
Keywords show up in bold in search engine results pages. The make a difference between who clicks on your site, and who chooses your competitors’ site (who likely has a keyword optimized meta description!).
You have about 300 characters to optimize on the search engine results page, so choose them wisely – and add your target keywords to describe exactly what’s on your page in a few lines!
Search engines like Google include ‘rich results’, which are shown on the search engine results page (SERP). Pop your target keywords into the search engine, and you may find your SERP shows a featured snippet above the other results. Use that snippet of information to learn what your own content is competing against.
If your SERP for your target keyword/s shows a lot of images or videos, ensure you optimize your content to compete with this, too!
Competing with rich results or image-rich organic SERP might mean changing the way you structure information to compete against the rich results, or adding schema markup to your blog…
Schema markup essentially tells search engines what your data means, not just what it says. Usually, content on your blog or website becomes indexed and returned in search results. With scheme markup, some of the content is indexed and returned on SERP’s in a different way.
For example, if your website includes important information about a certain person, a regular SERP entry will just show that the words making up their name are in your content. By using the correct schema markup, you (the content creator) can tell the search engine that the two words are a name, who the person is, and what they do – rather than two random names. Then, when someone searches for that name, the SERP will return rich results about what your page says about that person.
You can add schema markup in the coding or HTLM of your website and blog.
There are a number of great websites out there that will help you understand how to use schema markup. Start learning today! You can even add a schema mark up plugin to your WordPress blog. Here is a particularly one: All In One Schema Rich Snippets
Once again, links are important because they are ranking signals for search engine algorithms. Whilst other websites might not link you, it doesn’t really matter – you can still link plenty other sites, and you can link your own pages, too!
Simply think about previously published posts that are relevant to your current topic, and add a link in whenever it makes sense to do so.
You can also look back over your old posts to link them to new blog posts – you can search your own site for keywords of your new post, and then link your posts together.
Each blog post represents a number of opportunities to strengthen your entire website, customer base and build new opportunities by being ranked higher on Google.
Getting higher rankings in SERPS, increased web traffic, and higher customer conversion rates are all valuable things you should be aiming for as a blogger!