SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, may sound a lot scarier than it actually is.
While some more advanced SEO tactics get a bit technical, you can absolutely learn the basics of SEO and apply them to your blog content strategy.
If you’re unfamiliar with the basic concepts of SEO, just think of SEO as a set of tasks that will allow search engines to understand your website more clearly and rank it higher in search results.
Even implementing a basic SEO strategy can improve blog traffic exponentially.
One of the first things you can do is to make sure that you are including relevant “keywords” within your blog posts and the pages on your blog.
When people search for these keywords, you are more likely to be found if you have a specific density of the keyword.
You don’t want to include a ridiculous number of each keyword you are trying to rank for.
This is called “keyword stuffing” and will actually decrease your search rankings.
Try using Google Keyword Planner to find keywords for your blog.
Then, include them in posts strategically and use them in image alt attributes.
Another step that you can take to improve your blog’s SEO is writing well-crafted meta descriptions.
This isn’t incredibly technical, though if you work with a web developer to add elements to your business’s blog, you will probably want to get them to add the meta descriptions to your site.
If your blog uses WordPress and you update the blog yourself, you can use a plugin like Yoast to complete some basic SEO tasks including analyzing keyword density and writing meta descriptions.
How to Optimise Your Blog Images For SEO
When creating images for your blog, make sure that you have images that are properly optimized for each social media platform that your business uses.
Image-based search engines like Google Images can generate a significant amount of website traffic. Communicating important details about your images will improve a search engine’s understanding of your images and boost your image search performance.
Here are my top simple steps for optimizing your blog images for search engines:
Before you upload your image file, ensure the file name contains your keywords and enough information to help search engines understand what your image is about.
Make sure your image file size is as small as possible. Use an image editing application to reduce the file size without compromising quality. Alternatively, run the image through an image size shrinker such as tinyjpg.com or smash.it.
Google recommends that an image has useful information in the alt tag as well as other tags such as the title tag. All search engines rely on this information as they can’t ‘see’ images.
If you’re using WordPress for you blog, the Media page enables you to enter this descriptive information in a number of fields.
- This descriptive image information includes:
- Title (max. 60 characters)
- Description (max. 155 characters)
- Alt tag (max. 125 characters)
- Caption (optional)
There’s quite a lot that you can do to improve your website’s search rankings: Link building, building specific keyword-focused pages, creating SEO-friendly URLs, and much more.
Some SEO tasks will be surprisingly non-technical and some of them might require that you hire external help.
Regardless, if you can create an SEO strategy for your business blog and successfully implement it, you’ll get tremendous results.
Until the end of November, we will be talking exclusively about content marketing.
We’ll walk you through all the details of not only what it is, but more importantly what you can do to use content to market your business, your products, and your services. We get into the “how to” details and we have plenty of strategies you can try for yourself.
We’ve prepared a workbook to help you prepare a content marketing plan. Download it for FREE.
DOWNLOAD OUR FREE WORKBOOK: Content Marketing Plan
