Ensuring that your website is ranking on search engines and visible to people is crucial for web traffic. The best way to increase rankings is by utilizing search engine optimization or SEO. But, how can you optimize your blog posts for SEO? Keep reading for an in-depth look at SEO for blog posts.
Although your blog content and topic contribute to SEO, and your Google ranking, there are more factors to consider. Being aware of these factors as you write and edit content can help you to better optimize your blog posts for SEO and thus, drive more traffic.
This is the amount of time a visitor spends on a particular webpage. As such it is a crucial factor to be aware of for user experience and SEO. After all, user experience goes hand in hand with search engine rankings. The dwell time is recorded from when a visitor clicks onto the blog post until they exit that page. This informs search engines to help the algorithm determine how valuable the content is.
However, dwell time is known as an indirect ranking indicator. This is because it can be subjective, as your blog could be short-form, thus taking less time to read. To boost your overall dwell time statistics, you can aim to publish blog posts with at least 600 words. However, ensure that these blogs are still full of quality content. Don’t add extra information that isn’t relevant just to meet the word goal.
Search engines care about page speed and loading times. Therefore, you should ensure that your blog posts load quickly. Visual elements can slow your webpage down, so remember to check file sizes and limit the number of images and videos per post. Additionally, review your website to remove unnecessary code and plugins. To find unnecessary or junk code, you can use a tool like HTML-Cleaner. This tool will locate junk code and allow you to remove it with just a few clicks.
When it comes to plugins, decide which are necessary to keep your blog running effectively. Often plugins that affect the front-end will impact page speed, so aim to minimize the use of these where possible.
Optimizing your blog for mobile use is a crucial factor in search engine rankings. In fact, over half of search engine visitors come from mobile devices, therefore, they’ll view your website on mobile too. The easiest way to create a mobile-friendly website is to keep it simple. Most pre-made themes and websites offer mobile options, so you just need to add basic customization to them. If you want to review how search engines view the mobile version of your website, use your Google Analytics dashboard to do a live test of the page.
All search engines aim to provide up-to-date and relevant results to user searches. Thus, search engines look at the index date of webpages, when ranking them. Usually, a search engine crawler will index your blog post the day it is published. However, if you update a post with a new link or updated information you can resubmit it for indexing. This changes the index date of your post, thus improving your search engine ranking. By reviewing older blog posts and updating them with current information and new links, you can attract more traffic with less work.
Now that you know about the factors affecting blog SEO, you must create content that can rank well. To do this, you should follow a few key guidelines.
In any industry, knowing who to target with your content or product is key. Understanding who your audience is allows you to create content they are interested in. The language you use, and the format of your content will likely depend on the demographics and behaviors of your audience.
Knowing what content your target audience wants is important. Keyword research will show you what they are searching for, and what they like to read about. Use this information to plan and write blog posts, including keywords throughout your content.
Search engines value visuals, however, as above don’t use too many. To boost your SEO ranking, ensure you add descriptive alt text to any images on the blog post. Using unique images also boosts the ranking of your blog.
Your blog title is the first thing a visitor will see and is likely to be why they click on your blog over another. Ensure your keyword is in the title and that it grabs the user's attention
To keep visitors on your website, ensure that you use an enticing CTA. If a visitor spends time on multiple web pages during a visit, your ranking can increase for each page.
To control how your blog shows up on a search engine, ensure that you add a meta description. When creating a meta description, keep your keywords in mind, and make it enticing to your target audience.
Using the information above, you can optimize your blog posts for SEO as you write and publish them. As your blog grows, remember to go back and update older content, to keep it relevant. All content you create impacts your search engine rankings, and web traffic so keep the above details in mind at all times.
