Now that you have a blog it’s time to optimize your content for SEO. After all, if no one can find your blog, there is no point in having it except as a place to store data. Optimizing a blog means making sure that the content is easily found when someone uses a search engine to look for relevant keywords. There are several factors besides the actual content of your post that can affect whether or not your blog will be visible in a search.
What follows are six tips to help you optimize your blog for SEO:
1) Post Frequently
Google and other search engines look at how often you post as an indicator of popularity and relevance. If you have regular posts that people find valuable, they may click on them more frequently, which gives those posts higher rankings in Google’s results pages. It also sends a signal to Google that people actually read these posts, which means it tries harder to give them high-ranking results as well.
2) Use Keywords Often
Using your keywords in blog posts can increase their visibility, but some bloggers go overboard. If every single post has the same keyword stuffed into all of its sentences, you will look suspicious. Cleveland SEO company says that Google attempts to measure how many times you use a particular word or phrase on your website and then uses that information to determine whether your site is relevant for it. If you do not repeat the word often enough, Google may think that it does not actually fit into any real content of your blog. You need to find an appropriate balance between using repeated phrases too much and too little, which varies depending upon what topic your blog covers. For example, if your blog discusses cars exclusively, it would be normal to use the same phrase “operating costs” fifty times in one post even though it would be ridiculous to use it once on a food blog.
3) Use Images and Video as appropriate
You should include images and video whenever they can illustrate your points better than text alone. According to Cleveland SEO company, they also help you rank higher because Google looks at how many times other websites link to them when determining their importance. As long as you let others know that the images and video are yours and provide a link back to your site, there is nothing wrong with using these other media types.
4) Set up Social Media Sharing Buttons
Posting useful information on social sharing sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc., helps get people to visit your website. By installing a plugin for WordPress, you can make it extremely easy for your visitors to share your blog with others on these social media sites. Most of them offer a free service and they automatically post links back to their site from all shared content. There is also evidence that Google may pay more attention when people link to your posts via the social sharing buttons.
5) Link Out When Appropriate
In order to grow in popularity, bloggers need links to their sites from other blogs and news websites which is the primary expertise of Cleveland SEO. In turn, it helps provide backlinks if you reference related articles or blog posts in your own work and have a link ready for readers at the bottom of the article so that they can click on it easily if they are interested in learning more.
6) Fill Out the About Page and Other Detailed Pages
Finally, Google wants to see that people are really interested in your blog by looking at how many visitors peruse your About page, Contact page, and any other detailed pages related to your blog. When you write them, try to make sure they include search terms as well so that you will get more traffic from those phrases and not just from whatever keywords might apply to a particular post.
Conclusion
By following these guidelines for optimizing a blog for SEO, you should be able to gain increased visibility with each new posting. Hopefully, this will translate into more readers and lead to an increase in subscribers as well as those who donate or buy items advertised on your website. A little bit of preparation now can reap rewards later.
