Blog posts can provide valuable information to your customers, potential customers, and anyone who decides to read them. However, most businesses do not choose to blog simply to provide valuable information. Instead, they do it to improve their SEO and search rankings. Strong blog posts can greatly improve your SEO and show Google that your site is a valuable resource for its searchers. We’ve compiled a list of the top five tips to use when creating an SEO-friendly blog post.
1. Consider Recent SEO Changes
SEO isn’t what it used to be. Most people know that SEO is constantly changing, but not everyone is aware of some of the recent and drastic changes to Google algorithms. These changes have shifted Google’s focus away from keywords and toward the overall ideas of a post. Google considers the value of a post and attempts to rank pages based on their relevance to the idea behind a search rather than exact matches to individual words. With these changes, keywords have become less relevant and reliability has increased in importance.
2. Create a Quality Post
With the new changes in SEO, the quality of your post matters more than ever. Be sure to include information that will be valuable to your readers. Verify your information to avoid including anything false. Create posts that are long enough to be informative and separate them by different, relevant subtopics. Because Google values quality posts, it’s important to make sure your posts are of sufficient quality.
3. Include Relevant Links
Wherever possible, be sure to link to other relevant posts throughout your post. Make sure that you only link to other high-quality, reliable posts. Although you should avoid too many links, as it will be perceived as spam, linking to other posts will help Google understand what your page is about. When you show Google the topics that are relevant to yours, it will be able to rank your page more appropriately for different searches. Additionally, linking to other websites is a great way of reaching out, and will hopefully result in the websites linking back to you. Because linking to relevant posts is so important, encouraging others to link to your post can only help you.
4. Make it Skim-Able
Despite what you might think, most people who come across your blog post will not read the whole thing. Instead, they will skim the post, reading headlines and searching for the most relevant information to their needs. For this reason, you should make sure your blog post is easy to skim. Make use of headings, sub-headings and bold words that will make your post easy to read and skim. You should make sure that readers can get the main ideas of your post from a skimming. Using these tactics will also help Google easily understand your post because the subtopics will reinforce the ideas relevant to your main topic.
5. Write a Good Heading
The title of your blog is not as relevant to its ranking as it once was. However, the title of a post is very important to get searchers to click on your post instead of someone else’s. There is so much content on the Internet that it can be difficult for searchers to choose, as many posts are very similar to one another. Writing a good heading and a good meta description is your best chance at getting searchers to choose your post. Consider searching your topic or proposed headline before settling on your title in order to make sure that your heading is more appealing than the ones that have been written. Writing the most appealing headline is one of the best ways to ensure that searchers click on your blog post instead of your competitor’s.
ImageWorks, LLC | CT Search Engine Optimization
While professional SEO services can offer many opportunities to your business, you should never depend on SEO alone for the growth of your business. The companies that thrive on the online world have a comprehensive approach and utilize both online and offline marketing strategies. SEO can be a big piece; however, it is only one slice of the marketing pie.
By integrating all of today's Web tools such as SEO, social media, pay per click, and blogs, ImageWorks, LLC can turn your site into a lead generation tool.
