How Blogs Help Build SEO

Breaking: SEO is a crucial aspect of any great digital marketing strategy, and blogs can be one of the smartest ways to optimize your website.

Read time: 2 minutes, 40 seconds

Blogging is a crucial component of boosting your website’s SEO by becoming a relevant source to find frequently-searched-for information. However, as with most things in the world of digital advertising, the target is constantly moving and marketers must stay up-to-date on the latest practices in order to optimize for the best possible results. These 5 tips will help keep your blog, and your website, near the top of search lists.

* For a glossary of SEO terms, we recommend this resource: https://bit.ly/2uJoCEn *

1. Do your keyword research

Planning out your keywords in advance will help your post be most effective for your intended audience. Throughout this post, keep in mind that our objective is not just to get the most traffic, but to get the right traffic. One tactic to employ during your keyword research period is to try to understand which websites already rank for your potential keyword. This provides insight into the competition and how your site will stack up in organic search results.

2. Choose the right key words, not more

Conventional wisdom would suggest that the more key words you have, the more likely your blog is to rank higher in organic search. At one point in time this may have been true, but today this practice will actually hurt your SEO as search engines recognize this as ‘keyword stuffing.’ Additionally, as stated in tip one, your goal should be to actually provide the information a person is searching for, not just gain a view or a click.  Focus on one or two long-tail keywords (three and four keyword phrases that are specific) per post and optimize for those words.

3. Link Internally

If you’re writing a blog post about a topic that includes information you wrote about in a previous post, link it! First and foremost, linking internally will give your audience a reason to stay on and explore your site for longer periods of time. Second, this practice will give your website more credibility in the eyes of the ever-important search engine.

4. Keyword Placement

Once you determine the keywords you think are best for your post, you should focus on finding the right parts of your post to include the terms so as to rank higher in search results. The four critical areas where you should try to include your keywords are the title tag, header, URL and meta description. Also, be sure to include your keyword within the first 60 characters of your title which is approximately where Google cuts titles off in their search engine pages.

5. Make your blog accessible through marketing

While bloggers hope to garner traffic organically through search engines, it’s always a good idea to promote your blog posts so they’re accessible to those who may not be looking (at that time) for your information. Post the links to your posts on various social media sites and see if you’re able to get shares, which translate to free advertising!

Gaining traction on your blog posts may be challenging at first, just keep in mind that perfecting the process of optimization is ongoing and fluid. Stay up-to-date on the latest SEO practices and avoid practices that hurt your results and you should see your organic traffic increase over time!