7 Ways to Improve Your Blog SEO Strategy

Bloggers sometimes lose sight of where to focus their content optimization or don’t follow best practices, which can negatively impact the results you’re trying to achieve. Your content strategy should go hand-in-hand with your SEO strategy. This will help you to increase your visibility in search results. Blogging is an excellent opportunity to maximize your SEO ranking, but you should follow standard blog best practices to elevate your results. Here are 7 ways to improve your blog SEO strategy. 

1. Write Effective Copy

It’s important to remember that you want to write engaging copy for your audience, not search engines. After all, they’re the ones who are going to benefit most from reading your content. Think about who your target audience is and what their needs are. Let this inform your blog content to build awareness around that specific need. Keep your content light and natural. Avoid any excess jargon as your audience will be less engaged in reading your blog. Use your blog as an opportunity to build credibility and position yourself as a thought leader in your industry. 

2. Organize Content for Search Engines

Search engines will read your blog like an outline, so it’s essential to understand how to format your blog. You should organize your post into relevant sections with headers that contain keywords. This allows search engines to quickly understand what your piece is about and which keywords you’re trying to rank for. An organized structure will ensure that search engines align your content with its search intent.

3. Don’t Keyword Stuff

A common mistake that bloggers make is over-optimizing, killing your content’s readability. One of the blog best practices is to include keywords two to three times naturally throughout the body of your copy. Don’t keyword stuff because you run the risk of Google flagging your content as spam, which can negatively impact your SEO rankings.   

4. Include Internal Links

Internal links are a great way to drive traffic to other pages on your site, such as other blog posts or service pages. In doing so, you’ll distribute authority and show search engines which pages on your site are most important. Adding three to five internal links per blog post is a good standard. Just make sure the pages you’re linking to are relevant to the blog post. Similar to keywords, don’t overstuff your copy with internal links because it can hurt your SEO rankings in the long run. 

5. Optimize Images 

One part of SEO optimization that’s often overlooked is optimizing images, so don’t miss a critical opportunity. Search engines don’t scan content for just copy. They also look for images that support the content you’ve written. However, they can’t see images the same way we do, so alt text informs them of what your image is about. Include your target keyword in the image alt text to help them rank on the images page in search engine results. All of these steps will also provide an overall better user experience.

6. Install an SEO Plugin

Yoast is the most common, but you can install various free SEO plugins on your site, such as SEMRush, All In One SEO, and RankMath. A plugin will help you optimize title and description tags to write unique meta descriptions and SEO-friendly slugs and image alt text. It also lets you create a site map to decide which pages you want search engines to index. 

7. Promote Your Blog 

Bloggers often think that writing high-quality content and following best SEO practices will get their content in front of the right audiences and rank high on search engines. However, promotion is essential for your content to succeed. After you publish a blog post on your website, you should promote it on your social channels and encourage employees to share it on their channels. 

 

The Takeaway

These tips are an excellent foundation when developing your blog SEO strategy. As your blog grows, so should your SEO goals. After you prioritize these best practices, you can focus your efforts on staying up-to-date with the latest SEO trends to improve your search rankings. Following these blog best practices will help you avoid common content optimization errors that can negatively impact your results.