After writing a blog post detailing useful guides, the next step is to publish it to get it in front of an audience and, next, monitor its performance to measure its success. Speaking of success, you’ll have more luck gaining audience attention by optimizing your blog posts for SEO and structuring your content to be easy to read. This article will cover the important tips you need to make your blog post a success.
You want to share fresh, informative, and engaging blog posts with your site users and visitors. You took a lot of time and energy to create some perfect content, proofread, edit them, make them all error-free, brand new (as it is unique), and post them to your blog. ‘That should do it,’ you think. The posts would surely attract thousands of visitors. Who wouldn’t want to read content this interesting?
A couple of months later, only a dozen or so users visited your site. A week later and the number crawls to another dozen, of which only a handful spent time on the post. You are devastated! What could you be doing wrong? Why are there hardly any visitors?
You look up your posts’ topics, and hundreds of blogs show up in the search result. Your blog isn’t even on the first search page; you check the second, third, fifth, and finally see it at the bottom of the 8th search result page. There’s your problem! No one is reading your posts because they can’t find you organically. Who would go through the trouble of going to the second, let alone, eighth search result page? Would you?
So, you begin to wonder how you can fix this horrible situation. How can you make your posts show up in the top search results? The best thing to do is to optimize your posts for SEO. How do you go about doing that?
Relax and go through the rest of this post. Here are 10 effective ways to optimize your blog posts for SEO.
#1. Do thorough keyword research before you start writing your posts.
As a new blogger, you have probably made the error of creating posts you feel your visitors may be interested in rather than giving them what they are actually looking for on the web. Doing this is akin to walking in the dark by feeling your way through when you can switch on the lights.
Your visitors are always looking for answers, and you can find out the questions they are asking by doing keyword research. Then you can give them answers. When you create posts about things people are searching for, you enable your posts for SEO, and they stand a better chance of being at the top search results. Tools like SEMRush are great for keyword research.
Keywords Research tools You can Take Advantage Of
- Google Keyword Planner
- SEMrush
- KWFinder
- KeywordTool.io
- Soovle
- Moz Keyword Explorer
- Keyword Snatcher
- Ahrefs Keywords Explorer
#2. Narrow down the keywords to get your focus keyword.
Now, that you have found the best possible keywords to optimize your posts for SEO, what next? What you need to do now is choose the one with the least competition, something that people are searching for the most. But that your competitors are writing about the least.
This particular focus word is your best bet to get users’ attention, as this is what they are searching for the most. You can then include this focus keyword into your post’s SEO settings to find out how efficiently you have used it throughout the blog post.
When you have done this, you will need to look for those keywords that are related to your focus keyword. You can get them by searching up your focus keyword on the web and looking at related searches at the bottom of the search result page.
These related keywords need to be included in your post most efficiently, so your post doesn’t get flagged off with keyword spamming! Yes, the search engines can tell. The internet knows everything!
#3. Make your blog post title and meta description catchy enough!
It is not enough to make a good blog post; you have got to make the title efficient too! Optimizing your blog post titles for SEO can increase your blog posts’ chances of making it to the top search results. Writing an efficient title and good meta description encourages users to click on your post, so you have to do the needful. The reason is the fact that the CTR or Click-through Rate of content plays a significant role in optimizing it for SEO.
Using your focus keyword in the title and the meta description is super helpful, as it optimizes it for SEO.
How can you make a great blog title?
One sure way is to use what is known as Emotional Marketing Value or EMV. This method enlists the tactic of making users feel connected to you or making them feel like they can relate with your posts through the use of Power Words. There are other methods you can use to create an efficient blog post title, but the result should always be to make it the most optimized for SEO.
#4. Link your posts as much as you can.
Phew! After all this work, you start to get the traffic you deserve but wait; you could get more! Now that you have successfully made it easy for visitors to see and click on your posts, you want to make them stay as long as they can. Remember, the longer users stay on your site, the better for you.
One way to encourage this is to link posts together. You can make your visitors read other posts you have by inserting internal links on your posts that will send them straight to either older or newer blog posts. Usually, it has to be something related to the article they first clicked on so that it would be easier to make them want to click on the links.
Linking up your posts as much as you can boost your blog’s SEO and ensure that your former posts keep on getting new clicks. Remember, this technique goes both ways. Do not make the mistake of linking only old posts from recent articles. Your older posts will come up in search results too. So you need to edit them and add links to new posts. Doing this will make the whole process more efficient.
#5. Use Photos and videos in your posts.
The top search results are always the most engaging posts. You can optimize your blog posts to be engaging by including photos and videos in them.
People are impatient these days and spend only seconds on a particular thing. You need to convince them to stay on your blog, and the best way to do that is to engage them! Draw their attention to your posts. It can be hard to do this with text, but photos and videos are more efficient for the job.
Be careful about copyright laws. You do not want to make the mistake of using material that requires permission without seeking it first. Doing that could get you into legal trouble. Don’t worry! You will easily find materials that do not require any permissions online.
You can also use photos or videos that you created. Even at that, you need to optimize your images for SEO and try not to upload videos directly on your site. Instead, create a YouTube account, upload it there and post the link on your blog.
Videos can slow down the loading speed of your site, and you do not want that. Do not forget that these users do not have the time or patience for things like that. Free websites to get photos and videos
- Unsplash
- Pexels
- Burst (by Shopify)
- Pixabay
- Free Images
- Stocksnap.io
- Life of Pix
- Canva
#6. Enhance the readability of your posts.
If your posts are easy to read, the chances of them getting to top search results are high. Search engines rank readable texts higher than other more complex texts. The reason for this is that users do not have time or patience. They have the rest of their lives to get on with; they are only here to seek quick answers.
Making your texts easy to understand can determine how long a visitor stays on your blog, so you have to enhance your blog posts’ readability. Here’s how you can do this.
- Use smaller paragraphs to make the text easier to scan.
- Use shorter sentences to make your texts easier to understand.
- Use good punctuation.
- Use effective headings.
- Use bullets in your lists to improve the text.
There are tools you can use that can make the job easier for you. Go online and look for the best tools to help you improve your readability.
#7. Arrange your posts using tags and categories.
Tags and categories are useful to arrange your posts for users, search engines, and also yourself. Think of Categories like courses you’re studying and Tags as the topics in each Course. Categorizing your posts helps you sort them out to the different subjects talked about, while Tags help to show what you talked about in each topic.
#8. Create comprehensive articles.
Do you remember what to do after choosing your focus keyword? If you do not, scroll up immediately. Anyway, if you do, you would remember that you have to look for keywords that relate to your focus keywords.
Here is how this is useful for optimizing your blog posts for SEO. They help you create an informative, helpful, and all-encompassing blog post on the topic you want to write about on your blog. When you write comprehensively on a topic, search engines tend to rank it higher.
You can see why it is useful to do proper keyword research on the topic you choose to write. These keywords give you a broader angle on what to write about the posts, making your blog post more comprehensive and more optimized for SEO.
Also, help your readers follow along with your write-up by ensuring each main point relates to your post title and objective.
#9. Do not stop optimizing your older blog articles for SEO
You have written a good blog post and published it online. Now you can dust your keyboard, start on new posts, and don’t need to ever bother about your old posts. Wrong! Do not think that you no longer have to optimize that post for SEO. No! That is just a part of the job. You have to put in some work even after the post is published.
It will be best to promote and share your posts on social media to gather more visitors. You can also add links that will direct users to other of your content and vice versa. Doing this makes users spend more time on your site and increases your rank scoring.
#10. Publish your blog posts on your social media pages
Another way to optimize your blog posts for SEO is by strategically publishing your content on your social media pages such as Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc., based on a content calendar. Your readers should be able to recognize you immediately as the author of a piece of content because of your writing style and tone.
Ensure your content also incorporate an on-brand message to keep it relevant. This will increase the awareness of every blog post you publish organically, which you will eventually appreciate more than advertising.
Now that you have gotten effective ways how to optimize your blog posts for SEO, you need to practice everything you have learned. In no time, your ranking will score higher, and your blog posts will become more visible to readers organically as they browse the web.
