How to SEO Your Blog Posts

Everyone wants to be on Page 1 of Google, but getting high search engine rankings for your business blog takes work. A lot of consistent, persistent, hard work. But where do you get started? And how to ensure that whatever you do as part of your digital marketing strategy, is actually bringing in results (and traffic)? Read on to find out my simple steps on how to SEO your blog posts.

If you lack a budget to hire an SEO firm or a marketing consultant to do it for you, this article is perfect for you.

How does SEO work?

Google and other search engines have developed automatic algorithms that rank your site. These "bots" or "spiders" crawl your website and blog checking across over 100 factors that determine whether your content is valuable or useless. These factors include backlinks, domain age, traffic, fresh content, social media, etc.

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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) therefore is the process of making sure those spiders are happy with that they find on your website. It is a complex field that is constantly changing as well, but fortunately there are a few constants that have remained the same since the beginning - and which you can focus your SEO efforts on.

Your Business Blog SEO Routine

Step 1: Solve problems with original content

You have to remember that Google’s purpose is to provide their customers with relevant and useful search results. Therefore for your site to be shown in search results, it needs to be useful for a certain search query.

The most important thing you can do for your organic SEO is create useful original content that solves problems of people aka your potential customers.

"Original content" means now more than just blog posts. You could include additional content streams:

Photography - get on Pinterest or Instragram and use original images on your blog. Even better if you take them yourself.
Videos - make tutorials or do video blogs. This builds links and traffic from YouTube and keeps visitors on your site for longer.
Podcasts - iTunes is growing fast for podcasting, and there are other sites you can try as well.
The goal is to build a relationship with your readers by creating content they are already looking for. So once you've got a blog post created on your website you can proceed to ensure it gets some attention and love from Google.

Step 2: Conduct Keywords Research

You could play the guessing game with what people type when they use a search engine, but with free Keyword Research tools available, why would you?

Here are some of the top keyword research tools, what's more - they are free to use!

You could use the Google tool, or Wordtracker. In addition, you can use this tool from Google to research trends in search phrases.

If you’re looking for a premium keyword research tool, look no further than SEObook.com, SEOmoz.org, or Raven Tools.

Focus on Low-Competition Keyphrases

Don’t waste your time going after highly competitive keywords as you won't be able to rank high for those without a premium SEO campaign.

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But how do you know if a keyword or keyphrase is competitive?

You keywords research tool should show you some stats on competition for a keyword, also you can simply type it into Google and see how many results you will get. Over 100k? It's competitive for a small business blog.

And don't worry - just because a keyword or phrase isn't competitive doesn't mean it won’t send traffic. Plus the traffic it does send is highly targeted for your particular business.

Optimise Your Post with the Chosen Keyphrase

This means you need to create a catchy post title that contains your keyphrase (normally it's Heading1 on your page). You need to include it in subheaders and calls to action (Heading2 to Heading 5).

And you need to write your META data (post title, description, URL) including the keyphrase as well.

You might find you need to slightly tweak your article to fit your phrase in better, but do avoid keyword stuffing: trying to include the keyword all over the article!

Step 3: Build Relevant Links Across Your Website

A backlink is when another website links back to your site from their site. And internal link is when you link to other content and posts within your existing website.

Not all backlinks are good for your SEO though. You need to beware of the following:

Buying backlinks: buying some cheap backlinks can get your site banned from Google. They are clever and they can track this.
Link source: where you get backlinks from makes a big difference. The backlink counts more when it comes from an old reputable domain with high ranking.
Anchor text: The anchor text is the words that are used as the link. You want this to be relevant to your targeted keyphrase.
Internal links to your own content and blogs is also important. They help Google make a map of your website and make sense how different blogs and pages fit together.

Your goal now is to link your new post with several posts and pages already existing on the website using anchor text that's relevant to OTHER posts you are linking to.

Step 4: Use Categories and Tags Properly

Categories are a standard component on your blog you can use to your SEO advantage. Besides making older content easier to find, categories help classify and organise your content into topically themed pages, which create additional opportunities for ranking.

What are the best practices for using categories?

Limit the number of categories you have. Categories are often misused with authors creating a new category (often similar in its name) every time they write a new post. This can lead to really short pages of content. For small business blogs, 10 to 15 categories are really all you need.

Select only one category per post. If you click on multiple categories before posting, this can risk duplicate content issues (e.g. same post will get indexed on several category pages).

Step 5: Add an Attractive Image to Your Post

Adding an image to your post has both SEO and user experience benefits.

Make sure to change the image file name before you upload it to your website. Google includes images in the calculation of the ranking. Google indexes both text and images for search results, relevant images contained in the post itself are linked to the corresponding page. Add your chosen keyphrase as your image name (seo-for-beginners.jpg for example). Don’t forget to use the ALT tag and title tag for your images, which also provide better usability and optimisation for your search ranking.

And your visitors will be happy to see an image that represents the content they are looking for - it gives them an instant visual confirmation that this page might contain some useful information, therefore it's worth spending time to read some of it.

Over to you:

Have you tried applying SEO techniques to optimise your business blog and get more traffic? What kind of results did you get? Was there a step missing? Let me know in comments below.

On the other hand, if you've found something that works extremely well for your blog AND that I haven't covered in the steps above - share it in comments too!

Liked this post? Share it with your friends using the social media buttons on the side. And we'll continue with the SEO theme over the coming weeks, with more tips and strategies for your business website. You wouldn't want to miss those, so just enter your details in the box below to receive updates on when they get published.

Thanks for reading!

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