Do you struggle with an underperforming blog? If the answer is yes then it is high time to optimize the blog through SEO techniques.
In fact, the best time to optimize your blog is when you are creating it. But, you can also go back to your old articles and improve them too on SEO score. In other words, blog SEO is important because it helps you get more traffic to your website. Moreover, there are many things that you can do to optimize a blog. In this article, we are going to talk about some of the tactics to optimize your blog post for SEO.
- Tips to optimize a blog
- 1. Plan Your Content with Proper Keyword Research
- 2. Set Your Focus Keyword to optimize a blog
- 3. Write an Effective Blog Post Title to optimize a blog
- 4. Make Internal/external Linking a Habit to optimize a blog
- 5. Add Images and Videos to optimize your Blog Posts
- 6. Add a Meta Description to Your Blog Post
- 7. Make Your Articles Easier to Read
- 8. Use Categories and Tags to Organize Content
- 9.Aim to Be The Featured Snippet in The Search Result
- 10. Make Your Blog Posts Comprehensive
- 11. Optimize Older Blog Posts
- 12. Spread your focus keyword nicely
- To Sum up
Tips to optimize a blog
1. Plan Your Content with Proper Keyword Research
It is very important to choose the topic of the discussion very carefully. Therefore, the recommendation is not to make blind guesses and choose the topic that is trending. Furthermore, one can get the idea of the trending topic through Quora or by using keywordtool.io.
Keyword research is a technique used by content creators and SEO experts. Additionally, it helps you discover topics your users are interested in based on the search engine data. Hence, it is the suggestion to use those keywords which draw the most traffic and where the competition is less.
2. Set Your Focus Keyword to optimize a blog
Once you have decided on the article, the focus keyword should be set. In fact, the focus keyword is the search word or the group of words that you want your page or post to rank for most. Hence, when people search for that phrase, they should find you. Moreover, this is usually set in the Yoast SEO as indicated in the image. My suggestion is to write the content first and then choose the focus keywords.
3. Write an Effective Blog Post Title to optimize a blog
The title of your blog post is very important for rankings in SERPs. Hence, it is imperative to set a crafty headline containing the focus keyword. But, make sure it is of optimum length so that the search engine does not trim it. Moreover, as the best practice, use more common and powerful words that trigger the emotional responses in your audience. Hence, WordPress comes with a headline analyzer. This tool gets active with the install of monsterinsights plugin.
4. Make Internal/external Linking a Habit to optimize a blog
Once you have blogged for a while, you will have enough content that you would want users to read. Hence, with internal linking, you can send new readers to check out your older relevant posts. Therefore, Internal linking is a great way to develop a contextual relationship between your new and old posts. Alongside, you can and should also go back to edit older posts to link to your new articles for maximum benefits. Moreover, it is also a good practice to link your blog post to an external website and always check the option to open in a new tab when creating any kind of links.
5. Add Images and Videos to optimize your Blog Posts
Search engines always rank engaging content higher as compared to other textual content. Hence, it is always recommended to insert images and videos in the article. For the images, it is required to set the alternate text field and set the source of the image in the caption section. More so, one can also create its own images using software like Canva. Alongside, please make sure to include copyright free images only. Furthermore, for the videos, one directly embed the link to the youtube in the article.
6. Add a Meta Description to Your Blog Post
The Yoast SEO will flag if the meta description is unset. Moreover, the focus keyword should be included at the beginning of the description. In addition, the meta description should give the readers the gist of the article and should be less than 156 characters.
7. Make Your Articles Easier to Read
For making the article rank higher on the search engines, it is recommended to enhance the readability of the article. Moreover, the topic of readability has been discussed in the separate article on the WordPress series
8. Use Categories and Tags to Organize Content
Categories and tags help you sort your content for everybody involved like reader, search engines and for yourself. Furthermore, if you think about your website as a book, then categories would be the table of contents and tags will be the index part of the book. Moreover, categories are used to divide your content into major topics discussed on your blog. In contrast, tags are the topics discussed in an individual blog post.
9.Aim to Be The Featured Snippet in The Search Result
This is the highlighted search result that appears on the top. In fact, Google generates a custom snippet from the article’s content highlighting the part that their algorithms believe to be the answer to the user’s query. Hence, their recommendation is to improve your content and make sure that it offers the information users are seeking.
10. Make Your Blog Posts Comprehensive
Search engines love articles that cover topics in great detail. Therefore, it is recommended that the article word limit should be between 500 to 1300. Moreover, Yoast SEO will indicate this fact to you. Alongside, it is imperative to break your large article into sub-headings and include the keyword phrase in the sub-headings as indicated by the SEO flag. In other words, we can say that the content is always the king.
11. Optimize Older Blog Posts
Many WordPress beginners tend to forget about the post after it is published. Therefore, here are some things that you need to do after publishing your blog post:
- Promote it on social media – Promote your blog post across your social media channels. Moreover, you can even automate this task by using IFTTT to share your content.
- Add internal links – Once you have published a post, you can go back to relevant old articles and add a link to your new blog post. Therefore, this gives your new articles link juice while also allowing users to discover it more easily.
- Track search rankings – You have optimized a post for SEO, but now is the time to keep track of its search rankings. It is imperative to track search rankings to check the performance of the keywords.
12. Spread your focus keyword nicely
The Yoast SEO will give you an indication of keyword density. Therfore, the focus keyword should be wisely used in the article. Moreover, it is preferable to put the focus keyword in the introduction probably in the couple of begining sentences.
To Sum up
To sum up, the above SEO techniques/tips will definitely help in getting you the readership and the traffic. Moreover, if you have any other suggestion, please make sure to comment on the article.
How WordPress can be used as a blogging platform? Read our blog here.
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