If you have a blog on your website, I guarantee you already know the importance of blogging. It’s now time to pay attention to the optimization of each blog post.
Most of the website owners and digital marketers fail to take advantage of blogging. A blog has enormous marketing potential. Statistics show 60% of businesses have blogs on their websites, but more than 65% of blog owners do not upload content regularly. However, just publishing content on the blog is not going to help. You have to create the content for search engine optimization. When you optimize your blog posts, your website is more visible to a targeted audience that is looking for your specific product.
Today’s SEO strategies for every Los Angeles company are all about content relevancy and intent. So when it comes to your business blog, you have to pay attention to what matters the most, and what the trending blog ranking tactics are.
Keep reading – I’ll explain.
Focus on long-tailed keywords that match your intent
Optimizing your blog content is not all about incorporating a bunch of keywords. Adding more keywords can hurt your search optimization strategy because the search engine considers it keyword stuffing. This also does not create a great user experience. Therefore it is recommended not to use keywords in content that feels forced or unnatural.
While you can use more than a single keyword in a blog post, but a great rule of thumb is to focus on long-tail keywords. Use one or two long-tailed keywords in the whole blog post, and it will help you keep the focus on a single group of keywords that your audience is looking for. In other words, these types of keywords generate the right type of traffic that can create great conversions.
Pay attention to keyword placement
Once you have your best set of keywords, it is time to place them in blog posts. Place the main keywords in the URL, title tag, meta-description, headers, and body.
The first thing a search engine does when it crawls web pages is to look at the URL and find out what a post is all about. Try to add at least one or two keywords in the URL. The title tag determines the relevancy of your content both for the reader and search engine. A keyword in the blog post title is a must. In each of the headings and throughout the content, use the keywords at a normal rate. This means include the keywords in a very natural way. Avoid using the keywords in a forced manner and make sure the content is reader-friendly. Avoid the risk of being penalized for keyword stuffing. A meta description of a blog post gives both the reader and search engine key information about your content. To have a great click-through rate use the long-tailed keywords in the bog meta description.
A mobile-friendly blog is a must
Just like having a mobile-friendly website is critical, having a mobile-friendly blog is a must. The percentage of people using a search engine from a mobile device is far higher than people using it from a desktop computer. Turns out Google ranks a responsively designed and mobile-friendly website higher than the rest. This is another example of a search engine favoring a mobile-friendly website, which has been true since April 2015.
When websites are mobile-friendly, they allow blog posts to have a single URL both for a website and mobile device. As a result, the SEO power for every Los Angeles company will be centralized and help Google recognize the worth of your blog and rank it accordingly.
Optimize the meta description
To repeat, the meta-description is text that appears in the SERP result. It lets a user understand what the blog is all about. The meta description gives your audience information about your blog, whether it is going to help them or not. The recommended length of a meta-description used to be 160 characters, but it is now 300.
Your meta description greatly determines the click-through rates. Apart from being relevant and compelling, it should also include long-tailed keywords. It is even better if you can make the keywords bold so that it can grab readers’ attention.
Optimize your images with image alt text
Each of your blog posts must contain images to support the content. The search engines do not always look for the images, but it looks for images that have optimized alt text. It means if you want to benefit from your Los Angeles company’s SEO blogs, then you should also include image alt text. It is because a search engine does not see an image the same way as a human eye. It’s just the alt text of an image that tells what the image is all about. In return, it helps to get ranked in the image result page of the search engine.
To give you more of an idea, you should keep the following things in mind:
- Describe the image
- Be specific in your description
- Don’t start like “image of… “— begin the image description, instead
- Keep it under 125 characters
- Use your keywords ( make sure you avoid keyword stuffing)
Since optimizing is a long term process, it is not expected that you incorporate all of these content SEO practices right away. As you get clarity about your business goals, focus on each of these aspects over time as your website grows. It will help you do some link building and get more organic traffic to your blog.