Blogging is so important for your online presence. It shows you are a thought leader in your space, is an easy-to-update way to react and respond to customers and news in your industry, it shows personality behind your brand; it showcases your staff’s knowledge and is a great SEO resource.
Blogging alone is great for SEO. It is a great place to reemphasize search terms and content that are important to your business. Blog posts are also great for more long tail search phrases (phrases that are 3-5 words in length) that are more unique, but usually have a higher conversion rate.
When optimizing your blog for search, here are 5 SEO elements to keep an eye on:
- Blog Title – Your blog title not only tells your readers what your post is about, but it tells search engines too. Make sure your title is clear, contains important key words and makes perfect sense. Many times, new bloggers write leading blog titles or vague blog titles, and those tend to underperform.
- Blog Post URL – Most blogging software will let you alter your blog post’s URL. If your URL is assigned to a default, like blog/53827, change it to match your blog title to the URL. WordPress, Type Pad and many other popular blogging platforms use your blog title as your URL, which is very handy.
- Headings – As you break up your post, use heading that are either h2s, h3s or bold to emphasize to your readers and search engines that this is an important break in the content. These are also great spots to add key phases that you are targeting.
- Alt Tags to Images – Images are great additions to your blog posts for readers and as thumbnails to your posts on social media channels. One thing search engines cannot do is understand what an image is of. What they can do is take some clues from you on what this image is that they are ‘seeing’. You can tell a search engine what an image is in the Alt Tag of the image. These can usually be adding at the time of upload or in the HTML section of your post. It also doesn’t hurt to name your image well when you save it and try to keep that smart naming scheme as you upload the image. For example, if you save a picture of a cow grazing in a field, name it cow-grazing.jpg. It will just be another clue to a search engine that this is indeed a photo of a cow grazing in a field.
- Formatting – Not so much a SEO element but you always want to format your blog posts. Lists, bolded terms, headings and short paragraphs are great for online reading. If your readers can get through your content easily, take away main points and respond to them, they will be more willing to link back to it, share it or repost… and THAT is good for your SEO. More people linking back to your posts shows search engines that you are a resource that people respect for these terms and this content.
Blogging is really great for any business. By keeping a few key SEO elements in mind when crafting your posts, you will be set up for success to rank for terms that are important to you and for more popular blog posts. Good luck!