What’s up with the SEO trend? Blogs are still effective in driving traffic and generating leads despite the rise in popularity of other types of content, particularly videos. According to the 2017 blogger survey by award-winning, Chicago-based web design and development firm Orbit Media Studios, a whopping 84 percent of the 1,000 bloggers surveyed—a 6 percent increase from 2016—claim their blogs deliver strong or some results. But no matter how amazing your blog is, your target audience won’t be able to find, read and be helped or converted by it if you don’t optimise your blog content for search engines (aka SEO).
This article was writting by one of our team writer’s Ceasar Ira J. Zagala
To help make sure your blog not only continues driving traffic and generating leads but also appear as high as possible on the search engine results pages (SERPs), here are no less than 8 things you need to do to optimise your blog content for search engines this 2019:
Research the most relevant keywords
Keywords, or the terms people enter into search engines to find information about a certain subject, are as important as ever to SEO. But they have changed as search engines become more and more sophisticated and voice search becomes more and more popular. Short, robotic-sounding keywords are being used less and less. Long-tail keywords are more widely used now. So are local searches. To find the most relevant keywords to your blog content, use keyword research tools, like Google’s Keyword Planner, SEMRush and Moz’s Keyword Explorer.
Use those Keywords to SEO Your Blog Content
Search engines index content using programs called spiders or bots that crawl content to find out what the content is about. Make it as easy as possible for search engines to find out what your content is about by including the most relevant keywords in the following parts of your blog content:
- Title
- H2 tags or subheadings
- Introductory/first sentence or paragraph if you’re using several keywords
- Concluding/last paragraph
- Anchor text
- Title tags and meta descriptions
Build Quality Links
Like using keywords, link building is an old but important SEO technique. By linking their content to authoritative sources of additional information, blogs appear more credible and rank higher on the SERPs.
Find Out the Solutions Your Target Audience Needs
As I already mentioned, one of the purposes of blogs is to help people. To be specific, they inform or educate. Blogs that don’t have no use for people and are unlikely to be read, considered as authoritative and ranked high.
Prevent yours from becoming such a blog by finding out ways you can help your target audience through it. There are many tools you can use for SEO research, including social media, Quora and AnswerThePublic, which improve your chances of finding those solutions out.
Write Comprehensive Blog Posts
Search engines rank content based on many different factors. Aside from being authoritative, there’s length. Studies show long content dominates the first page of the SERPs. So the longer, the better. But to be safe, make yours at least 800 words.
Make All Your Blog Posts Easy to Read
While long content is preferred by search engines and readers, nobody will read yours if it’s difficult.
Ways You Can Make Your Blog Posts Easy to Read
- Use short paragraphs, subheadings and bulleted or numbered lists.
- Break up the text with images, videos or GIFs.
- Highlight the words you want to draw attention to.
- Place notable quotes or tweetable tips in boxes.
Optimise Your Images
Image optimisation, or optimising and delivering quality images in the smallest size possible to avoid increasing page load time, is another SEO technique you need to keep in mind when optimising your blog content for the best results.
Ways to Optimise Your Images
- Reduce your images’ file sizes. The ideal size for web images is 1500×2500 pixels. You can use web tools like TinyJPG/TinyPNG, Bulk Web Resizer or ImageOptim.
- Name your images using plain but descriptive language.
- Include keywords in the names of your images.
- Optimise your alt attributes.
- Optimise your thumbnails.
Use Schema Markup
Also called structured data, schema markup is a new SEO technique. It involves using code on sites to help search engines better understand and use them to deliver users search results with additional information called rich snippets. Rich snippets are featured at the top of Google’s first page, boosting your blog’s visibility and reach if its content is used as rich snippets.
Here is a guide to using schema markup to help make sure you correctly use the right type of structured data on your blog, letting you enjoy even more traffic and leads.