SEO For Blogs - Optimize Blog Content For Search Engines

Search engine optimization is very important for search engine marketers, that's no secret. By optimizing your pages and blog articles, you increase the visibility of your content.

If visitors then type search terms that match your product or service into Google or similar search engines, they're more likely to come across your content.

Especially with Google, however, it is not easy to keep up with the ongoing changes and continuous updates. SEO today is mainly about relevance and purpose.

In the following, we answer these questions and more: How to find out which aspects are relevant and which are not? What are the current blog rankings and what should you stop doing?

Digital marketing is fast-moving, which can sometimes lead to confusion. We want to help you to keep track.

In this blog post, we'll show you how to optimize your blog articles for the search terms and topics you want to rank well for. Also, we will introduce you to a few more optimization tactics that you should keep in mind.

Blogging will help you with SEO for your content, as you can answer the questions of your customers and users here.

Using your blog articles to apply various on-page SEO tactics can help you rank better in search results, bringing more traffic to your site.

Instead, it's about giving you ten on-page SEO tips that will provide you with an entry point to an SEO strategy for your blog.

10 Tips for Search Engine Optimization for Your Blog Content

1. Focus on one or two long-tail keywords that fit the intent of your ideal reader

Keyword optimization of your blog article is not about putting as many keywords as possible in one text. This even has a negative impact on your ranking today, as most search engines penalize "keyword stuffing."

Such texts do not read very well, and good readability is a ranking factor that has a high priority for search engines.

This is to make sure that you consider the intentions and needs of your readers. Therefore, you should make sure in your texts that they do not feel unnatural or forced by too many keywords.

Therefore, you should focus on one or two long-tail keywords per blog post. Of course, you can more than just a keyword use, but you should consider the topic of your post carefully enough to look at the optimization to focus on a few keywords.

Why Longtail keywords? Longtail keywords are often asked questions and help you to meet the specific needs of your target group.

Site visitors looking for longtail terms are likely to read the entire post and would like more information from you. In other words, it means you can generate the right kind of traffic: visitors who are very likely to convert.

2. Mention one to two keywords in specific parts of your post

Of course, you should also mention the keywords you want to serve with an article in it. But which parts of a contribution are best suited for achieving a good ranking for the chosen terms?

There are four areas where you should prefer to put the terms: in the title tag, headings and body, the URL, and the meta description.

Title tags

The title (the headline) is used by most search engines as the main search line and gives searchers a first way to tell if a post is relevant to them. So it's very important to place your keyword here.

The keyword should be in the first 60 characters of your title because Google will truncate the remaining parts of the headline in the search results.

Google measures the pixel width and not the number of characters. Recently became pixel width for organic search results of about 500 pixels expanded to 600, which is about 60 characters.

If your title is very long, you should put your keyword at the top because otherwise the headline could be truncated in the search results.

This can then adversely affect the perceived relevance of an article. In the example below, we had a long headline with over 65 characters. Therefore, we have put forward the keyword for which we wanted to achieve a ranking: "On-page SEO."

Headings and body text

In the course of your text keywords with natural spacing should be repeatedly called in body text and headings. So your keywords should be mentioned in your text every now and then but in a natural, reader-friendly way.

Do not overdo it, or you'll risk being punished by search engines for keyword stuffing. In general, it's a good idea to think about how to include your keywords in the text before creating a new blog article, but that should not be your only focus.

When creating content, your focus should be on serving the interests of the searchers, not on how often you can accommodate a keyword or keyword phrase.

Instead, focus on helping your readers and answering the questions your visitors have asked about a particular article. If you stick to it, you'll optimize your text all by itself for the right keywords.

URL

Search engines also examine your URL to determine what your post is about. The URL is the first to be examined during crawling.

So you have a great opportunity at the URL to further optimize your articles because the URL is unique. Therefore, add one or two keywords here.

In the example below, we've created the URL from our long-tail keyword for which we wanted to rank: "Email marketing examples."

Meta Description

With your meta description, you provide search engines and readers with information about the content of your blog article. It's important to use your long-tail keyword so that Google and your audience know exactly what to expect.

The text itself also has a big impact on the click through rate, as it serves the readers' intentions. The more appealing the text is, the better.

3. Mobile device optimization for your blog

Did you know that today's search engines are mostly mobile-enabled?

For these valuable mobile searches, Google prioritizes sites that are optimized for different screen sizes. Since the introduction of the Penguin algorithm in April 2015, websites that are optimized for mobile devices are by Google.

To optimize your blog for mobile devices, you need the so-called "responsive design." Mobile-friendly sites have only one URL instead of two - one for computers, one for mobile. This helps your SEO since backlinks pointing to your page do not have to be split into separate URLs.

So you can centralize the optimization and allow Google and Co. to recognize the value of a post and rank accordingly.

Expert Tip: The ranking priorities of search engines are continually changing. To keep up to date with the news, you should, therefore, subscribe to the official Google blog.

4. Optimize meta-descriptions and exploit the whole place

The meta-description is an additional text that is displayed on search engine results pages and gives readers an insight into the content of a link.

The meta description provides searchers with information about whether your content offers what they were looking for and helps decide whether to click the link or not.

The maximum length of the meta description has since been raised. You can now use up to 300 characters. So readers can get a good idea of whether a result is relevant to them.

Your meta-description should not only be reader-friendly (i.e. appealing and relevant) but should also contain long-tail keywords for which you want to rank.

Note: There is no guarantee that your meta description will always appear on the search engine results pages.

As you can see above, Google may also show other parts of an article that contain the keywords that were searched for. Presumably, to show users the exact relationship to their query.

You do not have much influence on what text appears, but you should still tweak your metadata and your text so that search engines see the best content from the article.

You can do that by creating reader-friendly content in which the keywords are naturally integrated into the text flow. This makes it easier for Google to showcase the relevance of your articles on the results pages.

5. Optimize ALT-texts of pictures

Blog articles should contain not only text but also images that support your statements or provide additional information.

When crawling, search engines do not recognize the images themselves. They search for images with so-called ALT text.

Since search engines cannot capture the contents of images, use the ALT text to "see" images. So it is also possible to achieve a good ranking in Google image search with images.

ALT text also improves the user experience, as the text is displayed instead of an image if it can not be found or loaded. This also improves accessibility for people with poorer eyesight using screen readers.

From the technical side, ALT text is an attribute added to an IMG tag in HTML code. This is what a complete IMG tag looks like (bold text to clarify):

You can also add keywords to your ALT text, even if you do not greatly improve your ranking.

6. Do not use too many similar tags for topics

Topic tags help you organize your blog content, but if you overdo it, you're hurting it. If you use too many similar tags, search engines may penalize you for duplicating content on your site.

Think of it this way: When you create a theme tag, you'll also create a new page that shows content with the theme tags as well.

If you use too many similar tags for the same content, it will appear to search engines as if you were listing the same content multiple times on your website. For example, tags like Blogging, Blog, and Blog Articles are too similar to use in the same post.

If you are concerned that your recent blog posts may have too many similar tags, you may want to take the time to clean them up.

Choose 15-25 theme tags that are important to your blog and that are not too similar. Then use only these to mark your items. So you no longer have to worry about duplicate content.

7. Use URL structures that help your visitors

The URL structure of your pages (which are different from the URLs of your blog articles) should make it easier for your visitors to understand the structure of your website and the content you will see. Search engines prefer website URLs, which make it easier for them and visitors to understand the contents of a page.

The URL structure is thus here a categorization system for the readers. They know where they are on the website and how they get to other pages.

Search engines also prefer this format because it makes it easier to determine what information seekers find in different parts of your blog or website.

8. Maintain internal links

Search engines consider backlinks (also: inbound links or incoming links) to your content as proof of the validity and relevance of your content.

It's the same with internal links to other pages on your website. If you refer to a topic in a blog article that is covered in another post, ebook, or page, you should link to it.

Also in this post, we have already linked to several other pages because we assume that the information is interesting for our readers.

Internal links keep visitors on your site, and search engines show more relevant high-authority pages.

9. Use the Google Search Console

Google's free Search Console includes the Search Analytics report. With this report, you can analyze clicks from Google searches and determine which keywords users are using to find your blog content. Visit this Google Support page for more information about using the report.

If you want to optimize your older, popular blog articles for more traffic and leads, you can also use this tool.

Many content marketers find it hard to optimize their blog articles for search engines. Your blog posts will not immediately get a better ranking. Building authority in search engines takes some time.

However, if you frequently publish blog articles, continually optimize them for search engines, and ensure readability and added value for your readers, you will soon be rewarded with more traffic and leads - and in the long run.

10. Use topic clusters

Many blogs are still structured so that bloggers need to tweak every single post for search engines to rank for specific keywords.

The HubSpot blog was built that way until recently. However, this often leads to a confusing situation and users find it difficult to find exactly the information they need.

Also, if you post multiple blog articles on similar topics, your URLs will compete in search engine rankings.

A better solution for getting a good search engine ranking and addressing today's typical search queries is the theme cluster model.

To do this, you select broad-based core topics for which you want to be found and then create content based on specific, more-detailed keywords that deal with a core subject-subordinate or sibling topics. The posts are linked by the core topic, which creates broader authority in search engines.

The model uses a specific page architecture that helps to achieve a better ranking on Google and Co. by organizing and linking URLs.

Also, visitors can find information on your page that much easier. Our architecture consists of three components: pillar content, cluster content, and hyperlinks. This concept is still quite new.

You do not have to introduce all these SEO Tips and tricks for a better ranking on Google at once. But as your website grows, your ambitions for good search results should also grow. Then you can do link-building to get other sites to link to your blog!

Once you've identified the goals, needs and intentions of your ideal readers, you're well on their way to creating relevant content for them and getting organic.

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