7 Ways To Optimize Your Blog For SEO
Many bloggers, especially new bloggers constantly try to figure out the best ways to optimize a blog post for SEO and increase engagement.
They spend time researching and writing amazing blog posts. After publishing an article they find out that they are not getting traction on blog or website.
People are not reading content, no one is sharing posts on social media.
To overcome this here are a few simple tips that’ll help get people to read posts and share them.
Use relevant Keywords
When you want to optimize your blog posts for SEO, the first thing to do is to search for relevant keywords and use them in your blog post.
Do not overuse keywords. Let your keyword density be at about 1.5% with a blend of LSI keywords.
What is keyword density?
Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page. In the context of search engine optimization, keyword density can be used to determine whether a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase.
Experts suggest that the maximum keyword density is 1~3℅. Any more than that is viewed as spamming.
What is LSI keyword?
LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing) are basically keywords that are semantically related to your primary keyword. LSI keywords are also keywords that are contextually related to your primary keyword. It is known to be an important aspect of on-page SEO.
Craft Catchy Headlines
Using catchy headlines is a must if you want your posts to be seen and read.
A catchy headline is necessary because it makes your content easier to be found by search engine. It is also a great way to connect with your audience.
Hence, tweak your headline the best you can to come up with something irresistible. Use keywords on your headline, subheadings, and body of content. Do not overemphasize your keywords.
There are various tools that can help you generate amazing headlines for your blog post. These includes:
- HubSpot Blog Topic Generator
- Inbound Now Blog Title Generator
- Buzzsumo
- Coschedule Headline Analyzer
- Thrive Headline Optimizer
Ensure that your readability score is great
No matter how learned or educated your audience may be, people in general hate to read articles that are not easily understood.
You want your audience to comfortably stick around your blog, read your posts and share with their followers. Choose clear and simple words that are easy to understand.
There are numerous readability tools that can help you to do that:
- Hemingway editor
- Grammarly
- Readability test tool
These editing tools are simple and easy to use.
Hemingway app will highlight typical mistakes and put them together in a set of groups as you can see in the screenshot below.
When you paste your content into the Hemingway app, it will immediately analyze your material, highlight the errors, and present you with a Grade score.
On the top right corner of the screenshot, a grade is mentioned. A grade 6 or 7 score is good. The app lets us know the words and phrases to edit or alternative words or phrases to use.
Use Yoast to optimize your blog post for SEO
Content and web optimization go hand in hand.
Yoast offers you multiple WordPress plugins that will enable you to optimize your blog content and website for SEO and Skyrocket social sharing.
The top two plugins by Yoast are Google Analytics and Yoast SEO. These plugins will ultimately help you in terms of content, blog or website optimization.
Yoast SEO will provide you with an analysis of your post and show your areas you need to work on to improve your SEO.
It will highlight the following areas:
- Keyword density
- Images
- H2
- Meta description
- Inbound & outbound links, etc
Utilize on-page SEO
On-page SEO is the most essential process that will guarantee the search engine’s first-page ranking, and a successful social media marketing campaign if done correctly.
The aim of on-page SEO is to align with search engines in their tone of voice to help users understand the definition and background of web pages.
The activities of on-page SEO are performed inside your blog or website. It involves editing your blog post and other web content including your website for SEO.
To have success with on-page SEO, you have to conduct a comprehensive study on how to upgrade your blog content and blog data structure.
Factors include:
- Meta tags
- Videos
- Images
- H tags
- Links
- URLs
- Redirects
- Sitemaps
Editing those areas correctly will help to optimize your blog post for SEO and significantly increase website engagement and social media shares.
Off-page SEO
Just as on-page SEO can increase your blog content ‘s visibility, off-page SEO will help to skyrocket your blog’s position in search engine results page – SERP.
Off-page SEO involves projects you implement out-of-doors of your blogs perimeter – activities you performed outside your website.
These include commenting on blogs, forums, and groups.
Other off-page SEO activities are:
- External Link building
- Social bookmarking
- Guest Blogging
- Social networking
- Social media marketing
Be active on social media platforms. Frequently participate in the following activities.
- Interact with your audience and other users in your niche market.
- Share your posts and those of others on various social media platforms.
- Take note of Influencers in your niche, share their articles, comment on their posts, and mention them.
- Guest blog regularly on other blogs, especially on authority blogs.
- Network with those in your industry, connect and build wholesome friendships with them.
There are plenty of social bookmarking sites available. Take advantage of them.
Be sure to bookmark your articles on the more popular sites. This will bring you high traffic in return.
The concept of being active in these activities is to help promote your content and build external links to your blog.
Comment on blogs, groups & forums
This is among the easiest and most effective way to increase your blog post visibility, as well as get it read and shared on various social platforms.
Commenting on Blogs is a great idea because it helps you build relationships with other writers and their audience’ as well.
When you make comments, your information and comments are saved right there on the blog you visited.
So when others visit the blog, they are certain to read your comments and using your information, they are sure to find your blog post and read it.
If your content is interesting and valuable, they’re certain to share it with their audience on different social media channels.
Conclusion
People love to read and share interesting articles. Nonetheless, some amazing blog posts fail to generate success because they’re not well optimized for SEO.
Implement the tips mentioned in this article. Implementing the Strategies above will guarantee you success in this regard.