Writing blog posts is steadily becoming a trend now. Blog posts are written on anything and everything. But how does one ensure the visibility of a particular blog among the readers? Well to get traffic to your website, you need to optimize your blog.
This brings to the question, what is SEO? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a method which includes several tools, tactics and strategies to increase the visibility of your blog/article/content (of your website) on the results pages of search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.
Search engine optimization can be divided into 2 basic areas: On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO. On-page SEO mainly includes website elements comprising of web pages such as textual content, images and HTML code. Off-page SEO majorly includes backlinks i.e. links that point to a site which has been optimized from different relevant websites.
SEO is mainly required by those who want to promote or market their products and services. This has led to investing several thousand dollars by ecommerce businesses for getting effective SEO on their websites/blogs.
There are a variety of search engine optimization strategies that can help to improve ranking of your blog which includes developing and designing search engine favorable website, link building, writing unique content which is search-engine friendly, on-page optimization and so on.
SEO Best Practices for Blog Posts – An Infographic
Infographic Source: visual.ly
Here are some of the tips and tricks which you can use to improve SEO on your blog.
1. Make Your Content Lengthy
A study by Backlinko found out that lengthy content gets better rankings on the search engine results page than shorter pieces. This finding was further corroborated by the findings of SerpIQ. You might have several pages with content below 1000 words and most likely you wouldn’t find them on the first page of the Google. To get your content on the first page, you need to add extra content to your existing content. You can add content to any of your pages at any time without any hassle. But to be effective, follow these two steps:
- Concentrate on the page ranking within 11 to 30 in the search engines. Since these pages are already doing well, so adding content will improve their chances to get to page 1 of the results page. You can use any of the popular search engines or alternatively you can use Google Webmaster Tools (it helps in finding out all those keywords which bagged you a rank within 11-30). Open Google Webmaster Tool -> Property -> Search Traffic -> Search Analytics -> Positions -> Pages. This will show you the rankings of all the pages in the search engine results pages (or SERPs).
- Copy and paste the links to your pages in the ‘Add multiple URLs’ section and select ‘Perform Check’. You will get to know the total number of words for each page including anchor percentage and anchor word count. So now you can add content to all those pages having a word count of less than 1,000.
2. Make Your Content Engaging
Every search engine want to satisfy its viewers. So it will try to put all those articles at the top rank which have more relevance and are engaging. Backlinko in its study found out that a site having lower bounce rate generally gets a higher ranking. Make your content engaging by using these tips.
- Use Bucket-bridge technique i.e. use of shorter sentences and trigger words or phrases (like now, what’s the bottom line, this is crazy etc.) to precede these sentences.
- Incorporate more images into your content. This helps in grabbing the attention of the users who glance through the pages, illustrating assertions visually and breaking down the content into different sections.
- Use embedded media such as YouTube videos, Instagram posts, tweets etc. to make the content interactive, impart in-depth information and increase the time a visitor spends on your page.
3. Target Your Competitor’s Customers
Generally larger competitors make very slow moves with poor customer assistance and often lack some much-needed features. As a result, customers look for alternatives. They search alternatives as “alternatives to (the larger company) name”. So if you can include such keywords in your article, you will definitely be ranking high.
4. Update Your Older Content
You will find all the content which is shown on the search pages also have their publishing date. Since the search engines want to provide their customers with latest data, so the content with latest dates has better chances for higher ranks.
5. Use Short URLs
Backlinko’s study showed that shorter URLs have better rankings than longer URLs. This is because they are easy to read and give a better idea of the content. Longer URLs do not even show up in the SERPs properly.
6. Use HTTPS in Your Site
Adding HTTPS to your site increases trust factor with your customers and also helps you to know where they are coming from. Also, from August 2014, Google has started considering HTTPS as a factor for ranking.
7. Improve Your Site Speed
Site speed is a ranking factor for Google. Also, several studies have shown that visitors generally switch to alternative sites if a site takes too long to load. Site speed can be increased by optimizing sizes of the images (using Kraken.io), storing static data on Amazon S3 and using hosted libraries (like Google Hosted Libraries) for serving JavaScript files.
8. Outsource Creation of Content
It has been observed that more content means more traffic. However, content creation is a time-consuming process. So it would be wiser to outsource it. To be economical, only outsource those parts of content creation which are time taking such as collection of data to back facts.
9. Create Content With Topic Relevance
Make your content in-depth. As found out in Backlinko’s study, an in-depth, relevant content always outrank a shallow content.
10. Make Your Outreach Automated
You can get highly valued links only by sending tens of emails each day. An outreach strategy involves 3 steps – finding prospects, getting their email ids and sending outreach emails to them. You can automate the first 2 steps by using JustReachout tool and Buzzstream tool can automate the third step. It will save a lot of your valuable time.
Zahoor Bhat has over 10+ years of experience as an online editor and media manager. He has worked with major online news and content sites as a media manager. He is well versed with major content management systems and web platforms such as WordPress and social media networks including Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Google Business, Yelp, Instagram & Linkedin. He is an expert in content creation, proofreading and finally making it live. Being a social media expert, he is able to make relations with social media influencers and make sure to generate leads and grow business via different social media platforms.
