6 Post SEO Tips to Up Your Content Ranking

We are going to dive into some very easy to implement blog post SEO tips, because while many business owners do not have the time to stay up to date with the current SEO trends and algorithm updates, there are some simple tips to use when creating blog posts that can help you target relevant keywords that drive traffic to your website.

The first step is to determine what keywords are going to bring highly qualified traffic to your website. You can get some helpful hints by reading an older blog post we did about how to uncover long tail keywords. Once you have your keywords identified you will want to create blog post content around these keywords. There are six parts of each blog post that you will want to optimize for the particular keyword being targeted in the post:

• Title

• Description

• Heading

• Post Content

• Images

• URL

Most business owners do not properly optimize their blog posts fully, not fully taking advantage of the organic traffic possibilities. If you haven’t been properly optimizing your blog posts then use these SEO tips to go back and optimize your older posts, and make sure that all future posts are optimized fully.

Title

When writing your blog post title you need to understand that they impact the search results as well as click-through-rate. Your title should be under 60 characters and it is good practice to include your target keyword in the title, as close to the beginning as possible. Now, only do this if you can do it naturally. The last thing you want to do if have a spammy looking and sounding title. If your title include your target keyword the visitor is more likely to click on your post since it contains the keyword they used in their search query. If you look at the image below you will see the title we used in a blog post where our target keyword was “common business blog mistakes.” The title flows naturally and doesn’t sound spammy at all.

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Description

Your blog post description pulls the meta description for your post, and while it doesn’t impact search results, it can be a great way to pull a higher CTR. If your meta description uses your target keyword and related keywords it is going to appeal to the individual that performed the search. This should be written in a natural way, and there is no reason to stuff your keyword into the meta description. There are zero SEO benefits and it will just make your website appear to be spammy and low quality.

Heading

Your heading is telling your visitor what your content is about, and including your keywords in the heading provides a SEO benefit as well, as long as it is done naturally. There is no need to jam pack a heading with multiple occurrences of your target keyword. Use it once if it can be used naturally. Also, don’t just use your keyword in the heading. Make sure there is additional content around it, describing the blog post and providing some value other than just a keyword phrase.

Post Content

The search engines use keywords in your post content as a ranking signal, but it is important that you do not over optimize your content. Multiple occurrences of your keyword within the content can be viewed as keyword stuffing and this can lead to a penalty, dropping your organic rankings. Aside from the potential SEO dangers linked to keyword stuffing, it will also hurt your blog readership. People are not going to come back to a blog that features poor content that reads like pure spam. Always write for your audience first and the search engines second.

Images

It is always a good idea to include a SEO friendly title and description in your images. If you are writing very descriptive blog post titles then you can use the tile in your blog post image, and also write a description that explains your blog post. Image search is becoming more popular, so there is absolutely no reason that you should ignore optimizing your blog post images.

URL

You should have your site URL structure set up that each post has a custom URL and not a random extension such as the date of the post or just a numbered post. Using the blog post title as the URL extension helps with your click through rate. If someone performs a search and sees a post with a generic URL and one with the target keyword which one are they more likely to click on? In the example below you will see that we have our extensions set as the blog post title.

These are just some very basic blog post SEO tips to help you produce more effective content for your website. While not every business owner is going to have time to learn SEO, plan out a search engine optimization strategy, and then execute it, the individual producing the blog content can easily follow these tips. (business2community)