If you’re serious about SEO and building a loyal stream of traffic to your website, then this is the article for you! As discussed in our previous article ‘5 reasons why your business needs a blog’, curating regular content for your website is the perfect marketing tool to build brand identity and influence – but what’s the point of spending time and money on well-written blog posts unless people actually read them?!
Below we discuss some easy ways you can optimise your next blog post:
- Inbound linking: Seems like such an obvious point, but once your reader has finished reading your post, the best way to keep these visitors engaged is to channel them onto other areas of your website. This can be links pointing to other blog posts, links pointing to information pages, or even links pointing them to your social media fan sites.
- Keywords: Optimising your blog articles to include keywords and phrases is quite an art form – in the old days, Google and other search engine providers used to just count the number of times the keyword appeared in your copy – these days it’s not so easy to dupe the algorithm! This is fantastic news for freelance copywriters and people who are passionate about great content (like you, dear reader, I’m sure!) as it means that quality content is finally being ranked above dodgy sites which have resorted to thinly veiled key-word stuffing techniques.
- Meta tags for photos: Now don’t get scared on me here, meta-tagging is certainly not as technical as you are probably thinking – all it means is that when you add an image file to your blog (as you should be doing, as it makes the blog much more engaging for visitors to read!) , just be sure to include the keywords you are looking to rank for in the title and the ‘ALT’ field of your photo editor.
- Get syndicated: Another (more powerful) form of inbound linking, is to submit your blog posts to online bookmarking sites such as Digg & StumbleUpon. Additionally, you could search for online media hubs which syndicate articles within your industry and ask to become a regular contributor (NB: Just make sure that your original article retains its ‘canonical tags’ – a fancy word for the part in the back-end HTML code of your article which lets Google know that your site was the original author of the content and therefore will rank higher than the syndicated copy in search results.)
- Publish the links on your social media networks: Well this one is surely a no-brainer! Google has started to pay close attention to articles which are shared and ‘liked’ on social media sites. The reason for this is pretty obvious: if content is being shared, this is the equivalent of a recommendation and therefore Google see’s your content as being extremely relevant.
- Search for questions with a similar topic on forum sites like Quora and LinkedIn ‘Answers’: This is where you will find an active and targeted audience for your blog article because you know these people need the answer to their question, and you know the answer to the question lies in the points from your blog! Don’t forget to link back to your article.
- Calls to action! Numero uno importanto! (that means this answer is the most important one ….please excuse the pigeon Spanish). Calls to action are vital to your SEO strategy – there is no point getting people to read your blog just to leave your site and never return. Help your visitors out by reminding them to fill out your contact form, subscribe to your blog or monthly newsletter, or even ‘like’ your fan pages on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin & Google+….. See what I did there?
Bonus tip for WordPress users: Install the ‘All In One SEO’ plugin. This is a simple plugin which helps you by optimising your blog posts and titles for search engines ‘behind the scenes’.
Hope you enjoyed this post – Let me know if you have some great SEO copywriting suggestions of your own, and if you have any success from optimising your own blog posts?
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