SEO Blog Tips to Help You Rank Highly

Blogging can help your business’ SEO strategy majorly. Below are our top 14 SEO blog tips:

1. Perform keyword research
2. Optimize your keywords
3. Write in-depth content
4. Quality over quantity
5. Write in topic clusters
6. Have a mobile friendly, fast website
7. Create Clean URLs
8. Optimize metatags and metadescriptions
9. Optimize image alt text
10. Do internal linking
11. Do external linking
12. Create ordered and unordered lists
13. Write unique content
14. Share your content like crazy

Let’s review each of these SEO blog tips:

Perform keyword research

Our first SEO blog tip is to perform keyword research. Performing keyword research, or finding what your customers search for, is the most vital step in blogging for SEO. All too often we see businesses writing TONS of content but haven’t performed keyword research, thus, did not rank for many keywords. There are so many ways you can find keywords for nearly any topic or niche.

Let’s use the keyword “acupuncture” as an example. Go to Google, type in “acupuncture a”. You’ll see suggestions from Google. These are keywords that people are searching for! Continue until you find some valuable keywords, like when you type in “acupuncture f” and get the following:

Ah ha! Here are some potentially useful keywords: Keywords that imply intent of research to solve a specific problem related to our keyword. Want a quicker way to do keyword research for all letters like this plus questions people may have that include the keyword? Head over to answerthepublic.com. Type in your keyword (“acupuncture for”) and watch the magic unfold.

519 total results alphabetized! These are results above are only for the letter “A”! You can easily export all keywords into a spreadsheet with 1 click of a button. Pretty easy huh?

So let’s say you’ve narrowed down your topic to “acupuncture for back pain.” You can further input this into answer the public or type it in in Google. Let’s type it in in Google. Now scroll down to the bottom of the search results. You’ll see a header that reads “searches related to acupuncture for back pain.”

Some of these are golden keywords you’ll want to include in your blog post! For example, your main topic could be “acupuncture for back pain” and subtopics of “acupuncture for upper back pain” and “acupuncture for lower back pain”, as well as a few more from the above.

Google also offers a free research tool called “keyword planner.” This is a fantastic tool that you can get by signing up for Google AdWords, which is also free.

Let’s suppose you have a seasonal business selling Halloween costumes. Your keywords will most likely also be seasonal. Google has a pretty nifty tool to check out search trends based on time called “Google Trends.”

While this is an incredibly obvious example of a seasonal product, it easily illustrates the point! You can find what time of year (and where geographically) keywords are most relevant! Pretty cool huh? It’s important note that if you’re targeting a time specific trend to have your content produced at least 2 months before the spike occurs. This is because it can take several months or longer to rank for keywords.

Optimize your keywords(s)

Another SEO blog tip is to optimize your keywords. To help with your blog SEO, it’s important that the keywords you choose are optimized throughout your blog’s copy. Here are some quick hitters:

1. Aim for a 1% keyword density
2. Place your main target keyword in your h1 tag
3. Use other target keywords in your h2 tags
4. Use your main keyword in your permalink
5. Insert your main keyword in your metatags and metadescriptions
6. Don’t keyword stuff. Make it seem natural

Write in-depth content

The more in-depth your content is on a subject, the more you look like an expert! Don’t be afraid to give away knowledge secrets. Your customers don’t know you until they know you (if that makes sense). Be an expert, and write thoroughly on niche topics within your niche.

Many people ask us what is the optimal blog post length for SEO? You’ll hear a lot of different opinions on the number of words you should write on your website pages and blog posts. Our blogs are rarely, if never under 500 words. According to serpIQ, the average page on the first 10 rankings of Google search results each contain over 2000 words, with the top spot containing over 2450 words:

Writing takes time! Google and other search engines love robust, quality content that best match the search queries being performed. Do your posts deserve a number 1 spot? It’s tough, but you can do it!

Quality over quantity

Quality in most cases trumps quantity. The same can be said about blogging for SEO. If it takes your business a week to write a post, that’s perfectly okay! It’s better to have one great post than ten mediocre / bad posts. You will have a much better chance to rank that one great post than the ten mediocre ones.

Write in topic clusters

When we write blogs for our clients or when we advise our clients what to write, we typically advise them to use topic clusters. Topic clusters start with a main theme, or topic. In the case of an eating disorder psychologist, an example could be: “Types of eating disorders.” This main theme would list out all the eating disorder types with few paragraphs of information about each. The next step would be to write an in-depth piece on each eating disorder. You could further write in-depth topics on each eating disorders. The idea is that a cluster of posts point back to the main pillar post.

Not only does this organize your blog SEO efforts, but it makes it so much easier to come up with ideas on what to write about.

Have a mobile-friendly, fast website

Site speed is often overlooked when thinking about your website SEO or your blog SEO. It’s very important that your site loads quickly not only from the user’s perspective but from Google’s perspective as well. Site speed is one of the only factors Google has confirmed as a factor for SEO. Here are a few ways to speed up your site:

1. Minimize your images size
2. Make sure your HTML, Javascript, and CSS are clean
3. Eliminate unnecessary plugins
4. Make sure your site is built properly
5. Purchase a hosting plan from a fast, reliable host

Create clean URLs

Cleaning up your URLs is an “easy win” for your website and blog SEO.

If your blog post looks like this: /234kj34js9skjflsaf82349-jsalkdjl-ksajlaksjflsak-als-jf23-u423jslakf/ – change it! Include your main keyword in the permalink. An easy practice to follow is to use your blog title as your permalink. Make sure it’s not too long. The shorter the better typically.

Optimize metatags and metadescriptions

Optimizing your blog for SEO would not be complete without metatag and metadescription optimization. Metatags and metadescriptions are a very important part of SEO for blog posts. This is what people will see when they search on Google or other search engines. For example, here is what this post looks like on Google:

As you can see above, “blogging for business” and “why blogging is important” are in the metatitle and in the metadescription. It also seems naturally written. Remember, robots aren’t the only ones reading your blog!

Optimize image alt text

It’s important to remember that image sections on search engines are in fact search engines. We’d recommend using your main keyword or title of your blog in the image(s) on your way. If you have a very long blog like this one, you can also use the h2 (subtitles) tag verbiage. In WordPress, it’s easy to add the alt tag. Go to your media library, click on your image and you’ll see this:

Type in your alt text. You can make it the same as your title. Make sure before you upload the image that the file name of the image includes the correct keywords.

Do Internal Linking

Another way how to blog for SEO is to do internal linking. This is a big, easy win for your blog SEO. we have seen my search engine rankings jump 40-50 spots by following this SEO tactic. According to Wikipedia:

“An internal link is a type of hyperlink on a webpage to another page or resource, such as an image or document, on the same website or domain. Hyperlinks are considered either “external” or “internal” depending on their target or destination.”

It’s important to link internally to your top blog posts and website pages on all your other pages and posts. For example, if I were to mention benefits of local SEO for your business, we would highlight the relevant words, click on the chain link in the editor, and add the applicable link on our website. It’s as easy as that! Another tip: don’t use the same contextual link copy every time, switch it up.

Do External Linking

Many bloggers are hesitant to link out to other websites. Here are a few reasons why you should link externally:

1. Linking externally incentivizes links to come in to your blog
2. Search engines likely reward the behavior of linking externally
3. Linking externally properly gives credit to resources you’ve used

Create ordered and/or unordered lists

This is another blog SEO strategy that can benefit you greatly. Ordered and unordered lists are not as scary as they sound. They are bullets and numbered lists! Here’s an example of how using these strategically can benefit you in the search rankings:

As you can see above, our post on “How to build local SEO for small business” is ranked 3rd, yet we have an entire massive section highlighting our post above the other 2 search results! This is because we have captured what Google calls the “featured snippet.” Answering questions is a great blog post type to do to get featured snippets. Not only do you get clicks on your search engine ranking, but even more clicks on your featured snippet!

Write unique content

Another SEO blog tip is to write original content. Never steal someone else’s content word for word. You can summarize it, or mention it with a link pointed at the original. Just like in grade school, don’t copy someone else’s work!

Share it like crazy

The final SEO blog tip is to share your blog like crazy. It’s important once you publish your blog to share it on all your social media channels, send an email to your subscribers, inform influencers, and distribute on content distribution tools, such as mix.com. We also recommend writing multiple posts on your social media over time to “slow drip” all those good social signals to your website.

Thank you for reading our post on SEO blog tips. Want more blogging fun? Read our full post on Why Blogging is Important. Have any more SEO blog tips we missed? Leave them in the comments and we may add them to our list!

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