6 Ways to Optimize Your Blog For Search Engines
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the best ways to generate traffic to blog pages and brand awareness. One of the biggest goals for brands in the digital age is to show up on the first page of Google to boost their current mindshare. When clients start their SEO journeys, they usually know the basics, such as having a customized URL or writing a meta description. While those are great starting points, advanced SEO strategy can help take your blog to the next level and increase your likelihood of being seen by your target audience.
Why is it Important to Rank on Google?
Ranking high on Google means that your website is listed in the first few results when someone looks up a query. According to Impact Plus, an increase in SERP (search engine results page) rankings boosts traffic to your website, increases your leads, and improves the perceived authenticity of your brand.
How Do Search Algorithms Work?
According to Google, their search algorithm works by looking at multiple factors and signals– including the words in a query, relevance and usability of pages, expertise of sources, and the quarents location and settings. The assigned weight is then applied to each factor and varies depending on the nature of the query.
The Most Common Factors Are:
The first website in a query is the best ranked and rank decreases as the results ascend. Google regularly crawls websites, both on desktop and mobile views, to adjust their rank.
How to Optimize Your Blog For Search Engines
Conduct Keyword Research While You’re Planning
One of the easiest ways to start your SEO journey is to create a content calendar in advance, which includes topic ideas, deadlines, and keyword research. Keyword research is important because keywords give you insight into how quereant interact with your search term or topic. By understanding people’s search behavior, you’re able to answer common questions your competitors don’t have insight into and create relevant content that your target audience is interested in. Keyword research also gauges how valuable and competitive certain keywords and types of content are.
You may have noticed when you’ve conducted a google query, there’s a section called “People also ask” or “Searches related to.” These areas are great places to start when looking for keywords to use in your content. There are also a number of useful tools that can be used for thorough keyword research, such as Google’s Keyword Planner, SEM Rush, and Keyword Tool.io.
There are a number of useful tools you can use for this. Google’s Keyword Planner is free and uses the data the company collects on what people are searching for in the most popular search engine in the world.
Optimize The Individual Page for Crawlability
Your individual blog posts and website SEO, sometimes called on-page SEO, is a large factor in your overall website's ranking. Having a good on-page SEO allows search engines to better crawl your website and communicate to its algorithm what type of content you’re providing. In the past, Google heavily relied on keywords to tell its algorithm what your search result was about. However thanks to advances, Google's algorithm has prioritized semantics and linguistic patterns to prioritize the user experience and AI assistants, like Alexa and Siri.
No longer is the page with the most keywords seen as valuable to Google’s search algorithm. In fact, keyword stuffing can get your website penalized. Instead, Google values content that is easy for their bots to crawl, that’s comprehensive on a topic, and follows a set format of organization. Some ways to ensure your blog is easy to crawl is to use proper header and title tags.?
Best Practice for Header Tags:
Additionally, alt text on images should explain what the image is of and be friendly to screen readers and other visual aid devices. If you stuff your alt text with keywords or prioritize keywords in your alt text, Google bots may not have an understanding of the content and you’re sabotaging the accessibility of your page–which is a factor in your overall rank.
You can also boost your crawlability by using a custom url structure that tells Google the title of your page. They are also important when keeping your site hierarchy consistent as you create subpages, blog posts, and other types of internal pages.
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Work Keywords into Your Title and Header
Because Google now prioritizes the user experience, it’s more important than ever to create a page that is user friendly, efficient, and easy to navigate. Some ways to increase your on-page SEO is to use keywords in headers, meta descriptions, image files, and body copy.?
How to Work Keywords into Your Title and Headers:
Focus on using Long-Tail Keywords in Your Posts
The biggest goal for brands is to be so synonymous with their industry that they rank for very general keywords. For example, if you sell cosmetics, you’d like to show up for any search related to your products, like mascara or lipstick. However, it’s incredibly difficult to rank for general keywords. Instead it’s recommended to aim to rank for longer and more detailed search queries called long tail keywords.
Long tail keywords have a billion definitions based on who you ask. In marketing there is no set definition that everyone, including Google, agrees upon. However, there are a few things industry wide that we do agree on when it comes to long tail keywords.?
First, long tail keywords are less competitive and easier to rank for. Next, long tail keywords are usually similar variations of popular keywords, making it easier to write a lot of content around the same group of keywords. Additionally, long tail keywords tend to be between three to five words long.
Some Examples of General Keywords and Long Tail Keywords:
Adding in long tail keywords into the body of your content allows Google an extra layer of information, increasing your chance of showing up when someone searches for a query. You can discover your perfect long tail keywords during your initial keyword research, and when you write your page or blog copy you can have a list of long tail keywords next to you. This allows you to place them organically and helps ensure you cover certain talking points in your content.
Create a Pillar Page
Because Google’s algorithm focuses on the user experience, it favors comprehensive content. Google wants to see content that is organized properly using header and titles tags, and content that covers subject matter thoroughly. An easy way to do this if you don’t want to write a blog is to have piller pages about your topic. A pillar page is a web page that covers the overall topic in depth and links to the clusters of related content.
It’s best practice to have a pillar page that’s longer than average blog content. While there’s no one size fits all size, on average pillar pages are about 2,000 words. For most pillar pages it isn’t difficult to hit this word count because the content relies so much on content clusters, which are groups of related content tightly organized around a core topic.
Pillar pages work to boost SEO for many reasons, but mainly because they improve your site structure. In order to understand your website, Google’s algorithm doesn’t look at individual web pages on your site. Instead it factors in how the pieces of your content fit together and how each page is related. If you have a lot of content, pillar pages unify similar subjects and create a hierarchical map. Additionally, pillar pages are more likely to rank for competitive keywords with high search volume because they cover broad topics and Google deams them high quality content. If a querent is already familiar with a topic, they’ll search for long tail keywords. But if they are not, your pillar page content is perfect for them and if Google deams the content high quality, it’ll place it in front of an audience on broad searches.
Optimize Your Images for SEO
One of the most forgotten parts of SEO is optimizing images. We tend to think images are just beautiful and add visual interest to our pages. But they’re also a great opportunity to add extra keywords onto our page.
While alt text shouldn’t be prioritized with keywords, keywords can still fit in organically. For example, if you wanted to rank for the general term “running shoes,” your alt text may say “young girl in running shoes competing in marathon.” Google also suggests creating image sitemaps as a best practice because search engines cannot get information from visuals, you need to put as many clues as possible about what exactly they contain.?
Additionally, keywords should be added to the actual file name. When naming files, name them with the most relevant and descriptive keywords that you can. You can also name your files to match your alt text. To make sure image files are optimized for your website, it’s also important to ensure that they’re sized and compressed appropriately, so it doesn’t slow down your load speed and it’s mobile friendly across a variety of devices.?
Lastly, hiding any text is considered a black-hat SEO tactic. Black-hat SEO tactics will penalize your website. By covering up keywords with images or stuffing keywords into your alt text or description, you’re confusing the bots that crawl your website and risk Google penalizing you for a black-hat practice.
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