Tips For Optimising Your Blog Posts For SEO

Blog posts have so many benefits for your business and website, but if you aren’t currently optimising them for SEO, then the potential is about to widen significantly! SEO (search engine optimisation) for blogs, involves optimising your blog posts in a way that helps Google to understand the content in relation to a particular topic, so that when someone searches for those topics, your blog should appear high in the results. This might sound a bit confusing now, but when we work through some tips for optimising your blog posts for SEO, it will all become a bit clearer! 

Complete Keyword Research

Our first piece of advice when it comes to optimising your blog posts for SEO is to complete keyword research. You can use different softwares to do your keyword research, but it basically involves looking at different terms surrounding your blog topic idea and seeing what people are interested in. For example, you might want to write a blog about Organising Your Wardrobe, so when you use a keyword tool, you can search for this term and you will be given a list of keywords and how many people are searching for it each month. 

This will help you to choose the keywords you want to use in your blog (we will get onto how to do this), as well as the times of year when they are most popular, which will be helpful in deciding when you should be posting each piece of content. 

Optimising Your Blog With Keywords

Now that you’ve selected a few relevant keywords to optimise your blog posts with, we’re going to show you how to do it. You need to mention the keyword throughout the blog, without spamming it with too many keywords, as this will look unnatural. By doing this, Google will read the content, see that you have used keywords related to a particular topic, then when people search for these keywords, you should naturally appear higher in the search engine rankings. 

Include Internal and External Links

Another thing you should do is to include internal and external links in your blog post. Internal links are ones that go from your blog post to another page on your website, which are good for users because it helps them to look at other relevant topics and its good for Google as it helps the bots to crawl the website more easily. External links are also important, as it shows you are referring your readers to reliable and trustworthy websites for additional information. Using a combination of internal and external links is a strong way to optimise your blogs for SEO. 

Optimise The Alt Tag On Your Images

You’re likely to have images throughout your blog posts, so when you upload it, make sure that you go to the image settings on the backend of your website, and add an alt tag. Alt tags are designed for people with visual impairments primarily, as the Alt Tag can be read by screen readers and the image can be described to the user. They are also used by Google, as Google’s bots cannot process images, only text. 

So, you need to make your alt text as descriptive as possible for what the image shows, and as you are making it accessible, Google will reward you with rankings. You should include a mention of your keyword where applicable too. If your blog was about luxury clothing, and one of the images was of luxury womens tracksuits, a good example of an alt tag would be “three women wearing luxury womens tracksuits in pink, green and orange”. This is just another indication to Google that your blog is a good result for people who are searching for that term!