How does blogging help seo

Here are a few SEO tips for optimizing your blog pages:. If it does, then these are great topics for new blog posts. Keeping the SEO tips listed here in mind when creating new content will boost the organic growth of your site! Including images on your blog posts helps create positive user engagement!

Adding easy-to-understand ALT tags helps describe the image to Google and other search engines. This tactic is also great for people with vision impairments who are using screen readers. Structured data helps provide Google explicit clues about the meaning of a page. Mobile usage has surpassed desktop usage, especially when it comes to content consumption. Has your site been disregarding its mobile usability? If the design of your site is different on mobile than it is on desktop, user experience may be considered poor.

Make sure your designs align and ensure URLs are the same on all devices. In fact, every single blog post should target a main long-tail keyword consisting of three words or more. If you were looking for a book on digital marketing, would you pick book A that was published in or book B , written a month ago? Blogging regularly is a great way to add organic content to your website, showing search engines that your content is fresh and up to date, perfect to be shown to its users.

Back to the book analogy: if someone told you that they want to learn all about cooking with avocados, would you recommend a tiny page book or a larger volume with plenty of different sections that cover all aspects of cooking with avocados? Google prefers websites with lots of content , and updating your blog regularly will automatically result in tons of new pages.

On the contrary, if a user is looking for something and the title of your blog post promises to answer their question, they are probably going to click on it and read it , sticking around on your website. With plenty of opportunities for internal links, they are also likely to click on them and navigate to other pages.

A blog helps with SEO because it shows Google crawlers that those who find your website enjoy your content , and the search engine will prioritise it. Blogging about relevant topics in your industry is not only a fantastic way to showcase your expertise and build trust: it helps you rank for relevant long-tail keywords and attract a larger portion of your target audience. Your blog could be focused on short-form content that takes just a minute or two to read.

You might also include pertinent information at the beginning of your blog posts to give the best reader experience, which means less time spent on the page. Unnecessary code and overuse of plugins can also contribute to a sluggish blog site. Removing junk code can help your pages load faster, thus improving page speed. It simply shows you the unnecessary code and lets you remove it with the click of a button.

I also recommend taking an inventory of your blog site plugins. Decide which ones you need to keep your blog running day-to-day and which ones were installed as a fix for a temporary issue.

Plugins that affect the front-end of your site are a threat to page speed, and odds are, you can uninstall more of these plugins than you think to increase your overall site speed. On an individual level, your blog site might follow that same trend. But what exactly does it mean to optimize a website for mobile? The industry rule-of-thumb is to keep things simple. Then, keep an eye on how your site is performing on mobile by taking a look at your Google Analytics dashboard and running a mobile site speed test regularly.

Search engines aim to provide the most relevant and accurate information available. Indexing means a search engine finds content and adds it to its index. Later, the page can be retrieved and displayed in the SERP when a user searches for keywords related to the indexed page. You might be wondering: Is the date the content was indexed the same as the date it was published?

The answer: yes and no. But content can be backdated for several legitimate reasons, too, like archiving information or updating a sentence or two. One way to positively affect this SEO factor is to implement a historical optimization strategy. This strategy works well on blogs that have been established for a few years and have a fair amount of content already. Site crawlers will reindex the page — taking into account the updated content — and give it another opportunity to compete in the SERP.

Recent data, another indirect ranking factor of SEO, should be included in blog posts. Recent data gives visitors relevant and accurate information which makes for a positive reader experience. Over time, your readers will come to appreciate the content which can be confirmed using other metrics like increased time on page or lower bounce rate. Sign up here to take our free Content Marketing Certification course and learn about content creation, strategy, and promotion. Understanding who your audience is and what you want them to do when they click on your article will help guide your blog strategy.

Buyer personas are an effective way to target readers using their buying behaviors, demographics, and psychographics. Therefore, I recommend starting with the topics your blog will cover, then expand or contract your scope from there.

For an in-depth tutorial, check out our how-to guide on keyword research. Search engines like Google value visuals for certain keywords. Images and videos are among the most common visual elements that appear on the search engine results page. Alt text is a major factor that determines whether or not your image or video appears in the SERP and how highly it appears. Alt text is also important for screen readers so that visually impaired individuals have a positive experience consuming content on your blog site.

The purpose of a CTA is to lead your reader to the next step in their journey through your blog. CTAs come in all types of formats, so get creative and experiment with them. Buttons, hyperlinks, and widgets are some of the most common CTAs, and they all have different purposes.

For instance, you should add a bold, visible CTA like a button if you want the reader to make a purchase. On the other hand, you can easily get a reader to check out another blog post by providing a hyperlink to it in the conclusion of the current article.

Any great writer or SEO will tell you that the reader experience is the most important part of a blog post. The reader experience includes several factors like readability, formatting, and page speed.

Organizing the content using headings and subheadings is important as well because it helps the reader scan the content quickly to find the information they need. Finally, on-page elements like images and videos have an impact on page speed. Keep image file sizes low KB is a good starting point and limit the number of videos you embed on a single page. Now, let's take a look at these blog SEO tips that you can take advantage of to enhance your content's searchability.

Note: This list doesn't cover every SEO rule under the sun. Rather, the following tips are the on-page factors to get you started with an SEO strategy for your blog.

Optimizing your blog posts for keywords is not about incorporating as many keywords into your posts as possible. Nowadays, this actually hurts your SEO because search engines consider this keyword stuffing i. It also doesn't make for a good reader experience — a ranking factor that search engines now prioritize to ensure you're answering the intent of your visitors.

Therefore, you should use keywords in your content in a way that doesn't feel unnatural or forced. A good rule of thumb is to focus on one or two long-tail keywords per blog post.

While you can use more than one keyword in a single post, keep the focus of the post narrow enough to allow you to spend time optimizing for just one or two keywords. These longer, often question-based keywords keep your post focused on the specific goals of your audience. For example, the long-tail keyword "how to write a blog post" is much more impactful in terms of SEO than the short keyword "blog post". Website visitors searching long-tail keywords are more likely to read the whole post and then seek more information from you.

In other words, they'll help you generate the right type of traffic — visitors who convert. Now that you've got one or two keywords, it's time to incorporate them in your blog post. But where is the best place to include these terms so you rank high in search results? The title i. So, including a keyword here is vital.

Google calls this the "title tag" in a search result. Be sure to include your keyword within the first 60 characters of your title , which is just about where Google cuts titles off on the SERP.

Technically, Google measures by pixel width, not character count, and it recently increased the pixel width for organic search results from approximately pixels to pixels, which translates to around 60 characters.

Long title tag? When you have a lengthy headline, it's a good idea to get your keyword in the beginning since it might get cut off in SERPs toward the end, which can take a toll on your post's perceived relevance. In the example below, we had a long title that went over 65 characters, so we placed the keyword near the front. Mention your keyword at a normal cadence throughout the body of your post and in the headers. That means including your keywords in your copy, but only in a natural, reader-friendly way.

Don't go overboard at the risk of being penalized for keyword stuffing. Before you start writing a new blog post, you'll probably think about how to incorporate your keywords into your post. That's a smart idea, but it shouldn't be your only focus, nor even your primary focus. Whenever you create content, your primary focus should be on what matters to your audience , not how many times you can include a keyword or keyword phrase in that content.

Focus on being helpful and answering whatever question your customer might've asked to arrive on your post. Do that, and you'll naturally optimize for important keywords, anyway. Search engines also look at your URL to figure out what your post is about, and it's one of the first things it'll crawl on a page. You have a huge opportunity to optimize your URLs on every post you publish , as every post lives on its unique URL — so make sure you include your one to two keywords in it.

In the example below, we created the URL using the long-tail keyword for which we were trying to rank: "email marketing examples. Your meta description is meant to give search engines and readers information about your blog post's content.

Meaning, you must use your long-tail term so Google and your audience are clear on your post's content. At the same time, keep in mind the copy matters a great deal for click-through rates because it satisfies certain readers' intent — the more engaging, the better. We learned earlier that more people use search engines from their mobile phones than from a computer. And for all those valuable queries being searched on mobile devices, Google displays the mobile-friendly results first.