When it comes to digital marketing, SEO is one of the most important and essential techniques you can use, as not only is it hugely effective, but it doesn’t have to cost you a cent. Just in case you aren’t familiar with the concept of SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it is the process of increasing the quantity and quality of web traffic that a website or page receives by boosting its visibility in a search engine results page. While there are different ways that you can boost your website’s visibility online, SEO refers to the organic and unpaid results that can be achieved, rather than through paid placements such as adverts.
It is no surprise that blog posts are a popular SEO technique, as it is sure to increase traffic to your website when done in the correct way. Therefore, we have put together the top six essential tips for how to incorporate SEO techniques into your blog posts. By implementing some of these hints and tips, you will see a huge transformation in the visits to your site.
Do Keyword Research
Just like when completing any form of SEO content, it is important that you do your research into popular keywords so that you can optimize your site content as much as possible. If you are new to SEO then you may start creating content by just guessing what your visitors would like to see, but it is essential that you do some research to find out exactly what your users are searching for. All SEO content creators and experts do keyword research, as it helps them to concentrate their content on relevant and interesting topics. Keyword research should be at the heart of your content strategy and the keywords themselves will largely depend on your website and brand. There are keyword research tools available that you can use to easily find the most used keywords, such as SEMRush.
Add a Meta Description
A meta description is an HTML tag that you can add to any page, and it is the perfect way to show a description of what the content is without the user having to click on the page. By offering a potential visitor a brief description of what the webpage has to offer, you can entice them to click to find out more, and thus gain more traffic. Through adding a meta description to a webpage, you can advertise content on social media feeds, such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, meaning that you can further boost traffic from different sources. Due to the power of the internet, people are accustomed to finding out the information they want quickly, so providing them with a meta description of your content you are helping them to do this.
Top tip – you should also try to include keywords in the brief meta description, as this will further help your SEO rankings.
Make Internal Linking a Common Habit
No matter what sort of website you have, it is important that it is full of interesting, up to date, and relevant content. Therefore, after some time spent creating blog posts, you should have a wide range of different pieces that your visitors can enjoy. A great way to further promote your content using SEO techniques is to regularly include internal links. By doing this, you can reference old blog posts and give them a new lease of life. Just because a blog post is six months old, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t relevant and of interest to your new traffic.
On software such as WordPress, it is easy to create internal links to old posts by selecting the relevant words (similar to a hyperlink), and you should get into the habit of doing this with every new blog post you create. However, don’t make the mistake of only doing one-way internal linking and just like you refer to old blog posts in fresh content, you should go back through old content and link it to new posts in order to get the maximum benefit.
Add Images and Videos
Visiting a blog post that is all text is a lot less engaging than content that features both videos, text, and images. Therefore, you should be sure to make your blog posts look more appealing to readers by including images between paragraphs of text. It is important that you get the correct balance when it comes to the text and image ratio, as not enough text could limit how informative and helpful your blog posts are, but too much text and you could lose the interest of your visitor. You should also avoid uploading your own videos directly into blog posts and should instead use third-party platforms such as YouTube.
Use Tags and Categories to Organize Content
Even though it is important that your website is full of interesting and engaging content, it is also crucial that it is well organized and easy to access. A great way to do this is to use tags and categories to organize your blog posts into the major topics that feature on your site. WordPress has a feature for you to categorize content. However, you should also use tags on individual blog posts to group posts of interest together. But be sure not to use too many tags and instead focus on making the tags as useful to the reader as possible.
Include Keyword in Headings
As mentioned earlier, keywords are at the heart of SEO, so you should include them in the headings and blog post titles wherever possible. While it is important that you don’t overdo it when it comes to including keywords in your blog posts, you can also include secondary keywords in headings as an alternative.
You can easily optimize blog posts for SEO when creating your content, and if you are providing something different or useful to the reader, then combining this with some of the hints and tips that we have provided should help to boost your site’s success.