Despite the challenges with optimising a small website for SEO, you can still use the following 6 quick tips to optimise your blog post. We’ve spoken to a modern thought-leader, Amine Dahimene, an experienced SEO consultant based in London with over a decade of experience.
While you may focus most of your efforts on ranking for the main pages of your website, it is important to optimize blog posts for SEO too. Blog posts are great way to provide consistent supporting content for your website. Sometimes, the perfect blog post can even drive additional traffic to your site. The best SEO business is the one that takes the time to optimize blog posts that can help your website rank better, boost traffic, and increase leads. Here are some tips for quickly updating and optimizing a single blog post:
1. Choose a Good Focus Keyword
When writing a blog post on a given topic, the chances are that a keyword or phrase will naturally emerge. Make sure that this keyword is something you haven’t focused on before. Do a little research to see if there are any similar keywords that might be better for SEO. Yoast is a great plugin to use to optimize blog posts for SEO. It can help you find opportunities to incorporate that keyword into your blog post in a natural way.
2. Make Sure Your Meta Data Incorporates Your Focus Keyword
The key to optimizing a post for SEO friendly web design is to make sure that it is abundantly clear to both search engine crawlers and humans what the post is about. Without going overboard, make sure to include your focus keyword in the meta title and description of your post. This will ensure congruency between the organic search engine result readers click on and the blog post itself, making your post rank better.
3. Include High-Quality Internal and Outbound Links
It is best practices to include links to outbound resources as well as internal links to other content on your website. These links should be to pages that provide unique insights or explore certain aspects of your post in greater detail. Internal linking helps search engine crawlers find all of the pages on your website. It can help show how certain content is related.
4. Pick the Right Category and Tags
Categories play a role in how search engine crawlers read your blog. Unless you have a blog with thousands of posts, you should include only a few of the most relevant overarching topics as the categories of your blog. You should pick only one category per post. Tags can be more granular. They can be a great way to provide relevant context to a post. Be mindful of the tags that you use. Only incorporate a tag if you have at least 4-5 other posts that can also use that tag.
5. Optimize Your Images
Make sure any images that you use in your blog are optimized as well. They should be compressed, so they are not slowing down your site. They should also include relevant alt tags that, if possible, include the focus keyword of your post.
6. End With a Call to Action
At the end of your blog post, make it clear what you expect readers to do next. It could be subscribing to the blog, filling out a contact form, or scheduling a consultation. Encourage readers to take some sort of action, so you know who found your content useful. Including a call to action can boost leads and conversions enormously.
If you are taking the time to create thoughtful content for your blog, it only makes sense to optimize that content for SEO. Even if you aren’t specifically seeking to rank for a particular post, optimizing your blog can boost your website’s overall SEO. Sometimes, optimized blog posts do really well for no particular reason. Don’t miss out on potential traffic by ignoring optimizing your blog posts.