5 Tips on How to Maximize the Potential of Your Blog
Most businesses these days are doing SEO. That is the reason why some people go overboard when it comes to optimizing their website pages and getting backlinks for their site. But they forget one crucial page on their website, their blog page.
Thousands of businesses tend to forget their blog posts, and thus forget to maximize the potential of their SEO. There is a lot of information out there that tells you what you should and should not do. This is where we can help.
5 Simple Steps to Optimize Your Blog
Use One-Two Keyword For Maximum Effect
One of the biggest mistakes most people make when optimizing their blog post is they stuffed it with a lot of keywords. This is called "keyword stuffing". Once Google will see this, it will hit you with a penalty. This is considered as a sneaky move where you try to optimize many keywords on your post to generate higher rankings. This can also affect the reader experience as overstuffed keywords would look out of place in the content.
Aim to target one to two long-tailed keywords - question-based keywords - that will target your audience. By only targeting two keywords you are not overstuffing your post with keywords making your post more readable for your audience.
Putting Keywords In the Right Spot
Too often, some bloggers just put in their keywords in the content hoping that it will help with the rankings. It can only take you so far. But by inserting your keywords in the specific file, you will notice a boost to your rankings.
Title Tags
The title of your blog post must be compelling to both your readers and to search engines. Including the keyword is vital.
URL
Google will crawl your URL as part of their algorithm. This is an excellent opportunity to optimize your blog by inserting a keyword within the URL.
Meta
Meta descriptions are the little blurbs you will see under your page title. The meta description is a ranking factor for most search engines. Make sure you include keywords in the meta description so it can help boost your rankings and grab the attention of your audience.
Optimize Images
Most blog posts have images in them. Only humans can see the images, search engines don't. They can only see the alt-text, which is the information about the image.
This makes the alt-text another chance for you to optimize your blog post. And it is a pretty simple thing to do: describe what the image is about - you can include keywords too if it fits.
Internal Links
Internal links are the links in the content of your blog that points to the other pages in your site. Internal links can help you in two ways:
It connects the readers to other pages of your website, thus, making them stay on your website a bit longer.
It makes your blog posts more authoritative to search engines.
Keeping links internal can make a difference in the functionality and influence of your site. When it comes to maximizing your SEO.
Build Links to Authoritative Sites
When you come across sources while you are working on your blog post, don't be afraid to link to these authoritative sites or articles. By doing this, Google will detect that you have done your research and that you are trying to write a quality blog by mentioning these authoritative sites. As a bonus, if you are using social media for your site this can greatly help boost your authority and credibility.
Longer Posts Work Better
While standard blog posts are at most 300 to 500 words, it is better to aim in writing for longer blogs. But how much is too much? Studies have shown that readers tend to ignore very long blog posts. So how do you keep them reading through a long-form blog?
Keep it "scannable". What this means is that making your blog posts not too short nor too long by shortening sentences and paragraphs.