If you’re writing typical blog posts someone by now has surely mentioned you need to be sure you optimize them for SEO.
What?
I get it. Most writers aren’t up to date on what it takes to properly optimize for the search engines. For that matter, most SEOs aren’t either, but that’s another blog post.
The fact is that optimizing your blog posts will help them find a wider audience, and rank better in the search engines, particularly Google. But how to do that? Here’s 5 tips that will help your blog posts enter the blogosphere primed for action.
5 Blog post optimization tips
1. Target specific keywords – Primary among your tasks is to determine what keywords you are targeting. Like it or not, writing to be seen in the search engines mandates that you give them a clear road map to where you’d like to be found. Choose one primary keyword plus several secondary for each post, and be sure they are in the title, first sentence or two, and then when needed throughout your post. DO NOT overload and stuff your post; it won’t help and WILL hurt!
2. Shorter, more visual content – People skim web pages and in spite of the fact that this is your baby, they will skim here too. Help make your content more readable by breaking up any long blocks of text into shorter paragraphs, and adding interesting visuals.
3. Entice with compelling headlines – Remember that people love to skim? A good way to slow them down a bit is by inserting a headline that either raises a question or makes a claim that they need to find out about.
4. Enable social sharing – Be sure your blog is linked up to your social media channels, and that your buttons are conspicuously displayed on each post. These days it is a social world, and you want to extend your reach as far as possible.
5. Use a responsive design – These days over half of all web traffic is first read on a mobile device. If you’re not using a responsive design for mobile, then you’re going to miss out on roughly half your possible audience. Nuff said?
