Simple tips you can use to change your blogging strategy that will increase visibility on search engines, drive more traffic to your website (blog site), and potentially generate more activity for your business.

The connection between blogs and SEO starts with the fact that with every new blog post becomes a new page on your website – which is yet another opportunity to increase ranking for as long as the blog article you write is relevant to what your audience is searching for.

Search engines love new web pages and in particular they love web pages with text. Search engines love to match search keywords with keywords in your text so it is important to keep the word keyword at the top of your mind when you are writing your blog posts.

START WITH A KEYWORD RICH TITLE

Begin the process by applying some focus on the title of the blog itself. The is the first time your keyword(s) will become important. Settle on a blog title that contains keywords you can use throughout the body copy of the blog article. In this blog post, the title is “Blogging and SEO”. You’ll notice one of the header tags in the article uses those exact keywords and I’ve even been able to incorporate the keywords again in the previous sentence. Titles draw traffic and are designed to capture the attention of your potential reader so be creative. It’s also important to keep the number of words to your title to ten or less.
That said, here is a really cool website from HubSpot called the Blog Topic Generator – enter a couple words about what you want to write about and they give you some examples of what to title the article!

CREATE A TAKEAWAY.

Create a main takeaway for your post. What do you want the reader to go away with. As you go through writing and brainstorming, repeat the takeaway. With your takeaway at top of mind, create an outline for your post which you can use to outline the main points that support the takeaway you’ve created.

USE KEYWORDS IN YOUR ARTICLE EARLY AND AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE.

But not too often! The search engines are savvy enough to know that if they see keywords being used too often, you are doing nothing more than keyword stuffing in your blog post and they could potentially punish you for attempting to over-optimize your blog article.
While on this topic, get it all out first – don’t necessarily worry too much about editing just yet. Fill in the outline with your content and let your ideas flow (silence your inner critic).
After the article is all out there, go back to at least the first sentence (possible the first or second but no more), and make sure you can work your keywords into that first or second sentence and make sure you’ve used it again a couple additional times in your post. This is is really the meat behind blogging and SEO.

TIP: CONSIDER ADDING AN SEO PLUGIN INTO YOUR BLOGGING PLATFORM!

We use WordPress; which has several SEO plugins. Our preferred plugin is WordPress SEO by Yoast but there are several others you can look at as well. Bottom line is it is never bad to get a second opinion!

LEAN ON SOCIAL MEDIA.

Once your post is completed, drive traffic to if from your social media sites. This added link traffic is visible to the search engines as well. This gets a little complicated when it comes to certain social networking sites and the impact social buzz has on the results but at a minimum, if is always a good idea to drive link traffic back to your website or blog article when possible. Sharing it on social networking sites may also get the attention of an influencer who may mention or link to your blog article in one of their blog posts – that link traffic would give you an immense amount of SEO boost!

Make sure you have social sharing icons on your blog posts to encourage sharing of the articles as well!