For many, search engine optimization (SEO) is like another language. To others, SEO is more like an aged Rubik’s Cube that they have yet to solve. Don't let this be you.
An ideal blog or any other website includes optimal SEO content that is consistently updated. In this article, we will cover information about SEO, why it is essential, and how to optimize your blog.
What is SEO, and Why is it Important?
The average attention span of a person is decreasing every year. In 2015, a study from Microsoft Corp. found that people average eight seconds before they lose concentration. What’s more, it means that many people now have a shorter attention span than a goldfish! These notoriously ill-focused creatures have an attention span of nine seconds.
The above is a scary thought, but it should also be something that gets you motivated. You must do something that keeps the viewer of your blog post reading to the end. You should make a habit of always creating awesome SEO articles for your blog. Effective SEO or “search engine optimization” places your posts higher on search engines and will, by extension, attract more viewers.
SEO intends to convince search engines, mainly Google, Bing, Yahoo, or any other search engine to place content that is the most relevant to a person’s specific search higher. Ultimately, optimizing blog content helps web developers (or anyone who wants to create a website) increase organic traffic. This means that your site will be more easily accessible to people who are new to your specific niche.
Additionally, when people implement SEO techniques in their blog posts, they target direct or paid traffic and unpaid traffic. These are just a few critical insights into understanding and incorporating SEO for your blog posts, so continue reading to discover how doing it right can result in positive results with rankings, gaining website traffic, generating leads, and more.
Establish Goals for Your Posts
Determining and writing down a goal before you begin the post creation process is essential. Check out the following examples of some good goals to aim for:
- Attract loyal audiences for years to come
- Convince people to act on your great idea
- Hype a new product or service
- Share good news with your readers
- Reach out with your contribution to a conversation
It would help if you already have the post’s end goal in mind and written down before you do anything else.
Also, consider writing down goal metrics that clearly define how a goal is to be measured.
For example, the post’s performance can be measured based on the number of views it gained in one day and how many people shared it across social media.
Know Your Target Audience
The Oxford Dictionary defines a target audience as a particular group at which a film, book, advertising campaign, etc., is aimed.
Your stated target audience might be children or young adults. Perhaps, it is as specific as your blog’s Book Club.
No matter what type of audience your site is meant to attract, determining your target audience can be extremely beneficial to you while you decide how to properly optimize your blog.
There are several different tools with which you can view your site’s analytics. Some of these may be more comprehensive, so find a tool that gives you all the information you need to know in a manner that is accessible to you. The following is a list of some common tools that bloggers use.
- To learn more about your customers, start using Google Analytics.
- Facebook also has analytics to use.
- WordPress offers its users built-in tracking reports, providing prompt and on-the-spot views of traffic on their blog.
- Consider creating a reader persona to help you determine and better recognize your readers.
How to Optimize Your Blog
Here, we are going to provide you with more information on how to optimize your blog easily. This will cover the processes of choosing the right keywords, performing a competitive analysis, and beginning to create the post while being mindful of the two steps mentioned above.
Choose the Right Keywords
The third step is choosing the right keywords.
It is best practice to aim for three to five main keyword phrases in your SEO blog posts while sub keyword phrases should range from one to two.
The goal is to choose keywords with high volume and low difficulty, so three to five main keyword phrases to target is not only doable, but ideal.
In other words, keywords with fairly high numbers, low difficulty, and a huge ratio of users who click on your SEO blog posts will be deemed ineffective given that it doesn’t meet your target audience.
Perform a Competitive Analysis
Take a closer look at the competitors to see how you can do better and be better.
This tactic is useful and easy to do. You might not know who all of your competitors are. Just plug in your main keyword into Google and see what results pop up on the screen.
What's more, you can visit the websites that are most similar to the ones you are writing for and look at blog articles or similar content.
Thoroughly look at each article’s outline and make notes on how you can best their SEO blog posts. The aim is always to write 100x better content than what is on your competitor’s page.
Finally, look at questions on Google’s first search engine results page for more ideas on what you can include in your articles, or better yet, include some of these questions in your content or an FAQ section.
Create Your Post
Now that you are set to begin creating the post, consider these tips for writing killer SEO blog posts.
- Include multimedia: This also helps with reader engagement and can be in the form of images, videos, etc.
- Tell a story: Try to weave your product/brand into the article to help attract attention. Let the story show your readers possibilities and how they can achieve the same results.
- Use humor as appropriate: This helps keep the audience engaged and adds personality to your article.
- Use case studies or real-world examples: They are useful and help you even out your ideas.
- Structure your article: Don't write so the reader only sees a wall of text. This is a big turn-off.
On-page SEO: What to Focus On
1. The Title/Headline (H1 & SEO title): First off, you want to create a catchy title for your article.- SEO title: This is what appears on the SERP, also called the Title Tag.
- Ideal length: 50 to 60 characters. This is to avoid your title tag being cut off on the SERPs.
- No length limit.
- Include a variety of main keywords here.
- Should be 150-160 characters long (including spaces).
- Include your main keyword.
- Make it clickable.
- Main keyword:
- H1 (variety) and SEO title (exact)
- H2 or H3 heading—once; not necessary to use your keyword in both.
- Meta description: only or flows smoothly.
- In the introduction (the first paragraph is best)
- Supporting keywords:
- H2 or H3 heading—once
- Use 1x or 2x only in the rest of your copy.
- Page links: Google knows there is lots of information available, so page links are the building blocks of your article.
Conclusion
Writing effective and efficient content for a blog or website can be challenging. There are a lot of established content creators who have a good grasp of SEO and, as such, don’t have trouble attracting a regular audience. However, this makes it more difficult for new content creators to assert themselves and gain organic views.
We've provided you with a fantastic overview of SEO techniques here, but if you would rather let the experts handle it, reach out to The Urban Writers professional SEO team to write your content for you.
If you've just realized that you have a ton of existing content that wasn't written with these techniques in mind, do not despair. We can optimize that existing content for you too!
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