Digital Marketing
10 Tips for Boosting Your Blog's SEO Part 1
Nowadays, it's becoming increasingly popular for businesses to have their blogs on their websites. This is a great way to stay connected with your target audience and attract new customers. Personalized content on your blog is an attractive feature for those visiting your website. However, your blog might not fulfill its purpose if it reaches a limited audience.
What to do then to help your blog grow? Implementing blog search engine optimization (SEO) best practices is the best way to reach more readers. This article will explain what blog SEO is, why it's important, and provide tips on how to write an SEO-friendly blog post.
What Is Blog SEO?
Blog SEO is the practice of creating and updating a blog to improve search engine rankings. This approach usually includes improving the site's meta descriptions, architecture, page speed, and hyperlinks. Applying these improvements can boost website performance, improve the user experience, and increase blog traffic.
Why Is Blog SEO Important?
There's no point in writing a blog that nobody will even see. Here's where SEO comes into play. Improving blog SEO increases a site's search engine visibility and helps attract new audiences.
"Studies show that the first organic result on Google Search gets a 43.32% clickthrough rate (CTR) on average, while the tenth position receives only 3.11%. What's more, approximately 90% of users do not bother going past the first page of search results." - Hostinger Tutorials
Blog posts that use a variety of on-page SEO tactics can give you more opportunities to rank in search engines. This can have a tremendous impact on your business.
"56% of surveyed consumers have made a purchase from a company after reading their blog, and 10% of marketers who use blogging say it generates the biggest return on investment." - Basha Coleman, HubSpot
Here are other significant benefits of creating an SEO-friendly blog from Hostinger Tutorials:
- Boost credibility. Producing well-researched, high-quality content that directly answers users' queries will make building your blog's authority easier.
- Improve the user experience. Ensuring a navigable and user-friendly website will boost the likelihood of visitors returning and recommending your blog to others.
- Reduce bounce rates. Creating valuable, engaging content and easy to understand, so readers stay on your blog page longer.
Blog SEO Best Practices
1. Use relevant and targeted keywords
Keyword research is a technique used by content creators and SEO experts. It helps you set up the base for your content strategy. Writing an SEO-friendly blog post means that you need to know what your target audience is looking for in search engines. This will help you target keywords in your content.
SEO and Content Team Lead, Domantas G., suggests different ways to pick keywords that will generate traffic:
- Determine your website’s niche and goals.
- Brainstorm and make a list of seed keywords in that niche.
- Use free keyword research tools to find more related keywords.
- Remove keywords with little to no search volume from the list.
Here you can find some keyword research tools that are popular with SEO experts:
Ahrefs’ Free Keyword Difficulty Checker
After compiling the target keywords, choose one focus keyword per blog post and focus your content around it.
"Assigning a focus keyword to each blog post is crucial, as attempting to cover multiple keywords with different topics at once will only confuse search engines and readers. In addition, blog posts with too many keywords risk having an unnatural flow, resulting in a negative user experience and possibly harming the site’s ranking." - Domantas G.
2. Use header tags to structure your content
Header tags are a crucial part of SEO. Header tags are HTML tags that tell a browser what styling it should use to display a piece of text on a webpage. Similar to headings in print content, they're used to introduce the content below them. They provide structure and context for your article.
They are important for SEO because they help Google understand your content. In turn, they help to make your blog more user-friendly. They provide context on what your page is all about and give it a hierarchy.
Amelia Willson, from Search Engine Journal, explains the header tag hierarchy as follows:
- H1 tags denote the most important text, such as the central theme or title of a content.
- H2 and H3 tags are commonly used as subheadings.
- Finally, H4, H5, and H6 tags may provide more structure within those subsections.
Wilson also provides a great example of how to use header tags effectively. She compares header tags to a table of contents for a non-fiction book and offers these easy-to-understand descriptions:
- Your H1 introduces your page's topic, just as a title tells a reader what a book is about
- The H2s are similar to book chapters, describing the main topics you’ll cover in sections of the article.
- Subsequent headers, H3s to H6s, serve as additional subheadings within each section, just as a book chapter may be split into multiple subtopics.
Finally, make sure to include keywords in your header tags. Remember that Google uses header tags to gather context for your page. But beware! Using too many keywords can be counterproductive. Don't "spam" your header tags with too many keywords.
3. Include internal links
Internal links are links to other blog posts or different pages within your site. Link building is an essential factor in SEO. It's handy for both your users and Google as well. This is because it helps them manage your content and understand relationships between different content on your site.
"Internal linking is a great way to develop a contextual relationship between your new and old posts. It also allows you to pass relevant link juice to your older articles." - WPbeginner blog
When linking to other pages, use an anchor text that provides context to users about what they will find. Anchor text should be an exact or partial match of the target page's URL. You should avoid generic anchor texts such as "click here" or "check out this link" since they can confuse users and search engines.
A simple way to manage your internal links and add new links to old posts is by using AIOSEO. You can also use this internal linking tool that suggests relevant pages and posts on your site that you can link to.
"A blog creates more site pages that you can link to internally. It also gives you a chance to direct site traffic to other pages that can help your users." - HubSpot
4. Use alt tags to describe images
Alt tags are the written copy that appears in place of an image on a webpage if the image fails to load on a user's screen. These tags affect accessibility, user experience, and image traffic. This text helps screen-reading tools describe images to visually impaired readers. It also helps search engines to better crawl and rank your website.
To write effective alt tags, you must focus on describing the image and being specific. Include your keywords in alt tags, but don't overdo it.
Let's take a look at this example from HubSpot about image alt text best practices.
Here we can see an image with no official context. In this case, you need to provide an alt tag that includes the topic of your article or the webpage you're trying to link to. No specific place or person's name can be given with this particular image.
In this example, your article is about attending business school. Therefore, good alt text would be something like this.
alt="Business school professor pointing to a student's computer screen"
The fact that you included the keywords "business school" helps Google and users to find your article more conveniently.
5. Use descriptive file names for images
Nowadays, search engines are very efficient and are becoming increasingly smart. They're able to recognize and categorize images quite well. However, you still need to help them by providing context to the image.
Your images must be relevant to the overall topic of the post or page. It's also a good idea to place the image near the most relevant text in your article.
Also, instead of saving your images with a random name such as DSC00524.jpeg you need to name them appropriately. Being specific in your image description is critical. Consider the keywords users will type in the search to find that particular image.
"Be more specific and descriptive in your image file names. For example, red-wooden-house.jpeg is better than just house.jpeg." - Beginner’s Guide to Image SEO
To Be Continued...
We understand this is a lot of information to mull over. See you soon in part 2 of this article! For the time being, we will leave you with these first five tips to improve your blog's SEO.
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