There are plenty of compelling reasons to build a content-rich website, and improving your site’s search engine optimization (SEO) is one of them. Regularly adding new, unique, high-quality content helps push your site up in Google rankings for its target keywords. It also creates more opportunities to be found (and appreciated!) when individual pieces provide information people are looking for. And implementing current SEO best practices for blog posts and articles helps this content be discovered.
While many people still think of SEO as some sort of complicated, mystical process, it’s really not. The fundamental things you should do to help your content be as discoverable as possible don’t require any special technical knowledge; they simply require knowing to do them.
So, here are some easy ways to use up-to-date SEO best practices for blog posts and articles to publish content that people find when they’re looking for it.
Quick Tips to Search Engine Optimize Your Content
- Focus each blog post or article on one narrow topic
- Clearly define the topic in the content’s title (headline)
- Phrase the topic using a long-tail keyword that people would type into a search engine when looking for the information you’re providing
- Choose a different long-tail keyword for each new piece of content; as far as overall content strategy goes, it’s good to write for multiple focus keywords all generally related to primary keywords you want your site to rank well for
- Use the exact keyword within the first 65 characters of the title (so it appears fully in Google results)
- Tailor the page URL so it has your main keyword phrase in it; also use it in the meta description for the page
- Use your keyword within about the first 100 words of the blog post or article
- Use it in a subheading, too
- Repeat the keyword at a natural rate beyond this; don’t include it at a high frequency, as this is “keyword stuffing,” which gets your content penalized
- Write naturally, using synonyms and related terminology for your primary keyword
- Google your phrase and scroll down to the bottom of the results, where you’ll find “Searches related to…;” incorporate a few of the relevant ones into your content
- Include in-text links to 1 to 3 other pages (preferably at least one internal link to another page on your site and one external link to a page on another reputable site); set links to open in a new tab so you don’t lose your audience
- Make sure the links are naturally incorporated and relevant, leading directly to additional useful information the reader may want at that point in the content
- Write content as long as it needs to be to fully address its focused topic; SEO best practices for blog posts and articles are more about providing value than a particular content length
- Attach a high-quality image to each blog post or article; use your long-tail keyword in the image’s alt text
- Ensure that your website and blog pages are fully mobile responsive, as Google and other search engines give greater preference to those that are
