How to create an SEO optimised blog post

Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is a growing focus for many companies at a time when a website is your most valuable tool.

We have previously written about SEO mistakes to avoid, which you can read here. Read on for our top tips to follow when optimising blog content for SEO purposes.

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of optimising online content so that it is more likely to appear higher in search engine rankings. It is about understanding the criteria that Google and other search engines set, and making hundreds of, often small, changes to website pages to make them more appealing and compliant with these rules.

This is a continuous process requiring regular checks, updates and often fresh content on a weekly or monthly basis. Google employs increasingly complex algorithms to establish which companies feature higher in its rankings based on thousands of criteria.

Some of these include:

Site Speed
Relevant and Consistent Content
Keywords
Correct Company Information
User Experience

It's important to note that readability should still be a focus, as blog posts are intended for site visitors even though you are tailoring content to cater for the search engine's criteria.

Optimising content for SEO has never been easier, with many SEO tools available such as Yoast, which is a plugin that all WordPress sites can implement as standard. Yoast gives step by step improvements that need to be made. These can include keyword volume, readability, headings and more.

Keywords

Keywords are one of the main aspects of SEO optimised blogs as they allow the Google page trawlers to easily locate relevant information and index the page accordingly. Keywords should be concise and relevant to the topic, industry and your target audience. Think about the types of phrases that users may search for in order to find your company.

A key statistic to remember is that your keyword should only make up 3% of the total content in the blog post.

Keyword research is vital in choosing blog topics and your chosen focus keywords should be included in the title, opening paragraph and meta description. Tips on focus keywords can be found here.

Blog Structure

Readability, as mentioned before, should not be disregarded just to cater to search engines. It should be both interesting to read as well as adhering to SEO principles.

Your blog post should have an introduction, body and conclusion and should be at least 300 words in length. Using proper headings will not only inform the reader about what certain parts of the text are about and improve the readability for site visitors.

It is also best practice to categorise your headings with H1, H2 and H3 tags.

The difference between these is:

H1 is the main title with the focus keyword included. What is the overall post about?
H2 refers to the sections that break up content. H2 should use similar keywords to the H1 tag. In this blog, our H2 is: What is SEO?
H3 are sub-categories to break up the content, making it easily scannable.

Add alt text to images

Images and videos are the most common visual elements used to accompany blog posts, and are another avenue for Google to index the page. Adding relevant alt text ensures that the same keyword is shared across the various content elements and is also a great way to re-optimise older content on your site.

When considering images to use, it's also important to compress them so that the site speed is not hindered in any way. Google rewards pages with faster loading speeds, and this is one of the factors contributing to user experience. There are free image compressing apps and sites that can be used without sacrificing image quality. In order to ensure peak performance of the page, you should aim for images to be around 100KB in size.

Link building

Link building is crucial to SEO optimisation, as good use of links can increase the domain authority of your site. Higher domain authority sites will be granted higher search engine rankings, so think of each link as a vote for your site.

It is best practice to include both one internal link and one external link within each SEO optimised blog. External links refer to a link from another website and are best used if you are referencing a study carried out or a statistic about the topic. It is more beneficial to link to data that is most recent. That way, Google knows that the piece of content is relevant and up to date.

Internal links are also useful for SEO optimised blogs and involve linking to another page on the site itself. For example, linking to previous blog posts, as we have done above, or linking to a services page or contact page. Internal links are beneficial as they keep users on your site, which in turn positively impacts SEO.

If you need help with developing SEO optimised blog content for your organisation, get in touch with us today on 01792 293 333 or email info@serenglobalmedia.com

How to create an SEO optimised blog post

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