This is a guest post written by Raul Harman. Want to contribute? Check out the 2018 publishing calendar.

Optimizing your blog for search engines is incredibly important. When you do so, you’re actually making your blog more visible to the people looking for keywords associated with your company, brand and coaching services.

Still, this can be pretty tricky, given the fact that Google’s algorithms are getting changed and updated at an astonishing pace. So, how can you know what matters and what doesn’t? What are the best SEO practices that will help you jump to the Google’s first page?

These are just some questions entrepreneurs and small business owners want to know the answer to. In this post, you will learn a few critical SEO practices that will take your business blog to a whole new level.

Create quality content

Content creation and SEO are two inseparable wholes of digital marketing that are constantly intertwining. After all, if it weren’t for quality content, SEO wouldn’t exist and vice versa.

Traditionally, web pages were stuffed with spammy links and a bunch of keywords that were compromising the quality and structure of the content. Apart from the fact that search engines are penalizing such sites, you should also keep in mind that readers are going to quickly bounce from a page that doesn’t offer them the information they are looking for.

Make your content valuable to a reader

Precisely because of this, you should write authoritative, informative, relevant content that is easy to read. Valuable information is likely to drive more traffic to your pages and attract more links. When search engines see other sites linking to your content, they will figure out that it holds some significant information and rank in higher in the SERPs.

Stay on top of industry trends

Focus on trending topics, interesting to your readers. Pay special attention to Q&A sites, forums and social networks to figure out what your target audience is talking about. Your aim is to find the hottest industry-related questions that haven’t been answered yet and answer them in your future blog articles.  

Take advantage of visuals

Studies have proven that 90% of the information transmitted to our brains is visual. Not to mention that our mind process visuals 60,000 times faster than text. So, what do these statistics tell you? To make your content more digestible, you need to make it interactive and pleasing to the eye. And that’s exactly where visual content shines.

Here are a few types of this content you should add to your blog as soon as possible:

• Images. The photos you choose need to be relevant to your niche and add a sense of consistency to your blog. This is why creating images on your own is probably the best option. Still, if you don’t have any graphic design experience, you can always go with quality stock photos from authoritative sites. In this case, just make sure you choose the images that tell your story effectively and make sense to your readers. For example, if you're a business coach with a business blog, then opt for business stock images. On the other hand, if you’re a a health and fitness coach, fitness stock images are the most logical option.

• Infographics are a highly engaging form of content that helps you present mountains of statistics and data in a visually appealing way. Most importantly, with a wide range of tools like Canva or Infogram that offer a plethora of premade templates, you can create a gorgeous infographic effortlessly. Given these facts, it’s not surprising that 41.5% of marketers emphasize this type of content as the most engaging one.  

• Videos are gaining momentum at an astonishing rate. Most importantly, users love them. According to some recent stats, four times as many consumers would rather watch a video about a product than read an article about it.

Do keyword research

To win over your target audience, you need to start thinking like them. For example, what topics are they interested in? Which phrases would they search for to find posts and sites similar to yours? These search terms are called keywords and they represent the backbone of every successful SEO strategy.

When doing your keyword research, always keep in mind that SEO is not about hooking thousands of people to your site, but attracting the right ones. This means that you shouldn’t look for and target only those phrases that are popular in your industry, but also those important to your target audience. Start by asking yourself what you would type in a search box when looking for a certain product or article.

Also, you need to check whether this keyword is relevant to your business blog. Does it match the purpose of your content? Will the traffic generated from this keyword help you get a higher profit? If the answer to the questions like these is yes, this means that you should use the keyword.

Finally, you should also check how your competitors are ranking for certain keywords. Still, keep mind that the keywords your competitors are using don’t have to be important to your business, as well. Your goal here is to use those keywords that will boost your rankings and help you drive more traffic to your blog.

Now, finding, monitoring, and analyzing the right keywords manually may be a daunting task. To get the most of this process and save a lot of time, you should consider in investing in some of most popular keyword research tools.

Optimize your pages for the right keywords

Once you do your keyword research, it’s time to optimize your blog pages for them. This simply means that, apart from the body of your text, there are some important aspects of your pages where you should incorporate your keyword phrases. Here are some of them.

• Title tag. Given the fact that it helps a reader assess the relevancy of your content, you should add a keyword to the first 65 characters of your headline to be sure that search engines won’t remove it in the SERPs.

• Your page’s URL is one of the first things Google will crawl. Since every post has its own URL, this is a great opportunity for you to optimize each of your URLs. This means making them easily readable by using hyphens and avoiding extra words. Second, you should avoid keyword stuffing and take advantage of the tried and tested businessname.com/topic-topic formula.

• Meta description. These are brief descriptions that show up below your page’s title. They’re supposed to explain what your article is about and that’s why they need to make sense to your readers. For example, you should add as many details as possible within 160 characters, incorporate your focus keywords and have a catchy CTA that will improve your click-through rate.

• Images. Remember, Google doesn’t see photos the same way we do. It searches for the images with so-called alt text that explains it what an image is about. So, instead of “IMG5487,” for instance, you should go with a more organic image name that makes sense to both your readers and search engines.

Link internally

If you’re writing about a certain subject matter you’ve already explained in some of your previous blog posts, you should consider linking to it. That’s called internal linking and it plays an immensely important role when it comes to building quality backlinks. By directing your pages one to another within the same domain, you will show search engines the validity and relevancy of your site’s content.

This practice allows you to improve your blog’s navigation, lead your potential customers to the content they may be interested in, boost user experience and, most importantly, reduce the bounce rate. Additionally, internal links help you create a strong hierarchy of your content and reveal your other relevant pages to Google, making it simpler for it to crawl and index them.

Now, here are a few rules of building relevant internal links you should definitely keep in mind:

• Never force interlinking. Namely, this is something that needs to be done organically, when you believe that the content you’ve posted before may add value to the new one.

• Link to the pages with a lower page authority to pass link juice to them.

• Link to the pages that are not easily reachable from your homepage.

• Pay attention to your content-link ratio to avoid being penalized by Google. In other words, you should limit yourself to the number of links appropriate for the size of your blog post.

• Make sure your anchor text is organic. It needs to be descriptive, natural and to make sense to a reader. Stuffing your blog posts with spammy and irrelevant links may get you penalized.

• Add the links to your latest posts to your older articles. This way, Google’s crawlers will spot your old article and index it once again. Most importantly, you will pass the link juice from your already popular page to a new one.

Conclusion

Hopefully, these tips will help you optimize your blog for SEO properly, boost your rankings, drive more traffic to your site, and gain a competitive edge over your competitors.

What strategies do you use to optimize your blog for search engines?

About Raul Harman

My name is Raul, editor in chief at Technivorz blog. I have a lot to say about innovations in all aspects of digital technology and online marketing. You can reach me out on Twitter.

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