Blog posting is something you can carry out without external assistance, providing you have the time to create pieces of content that both your audience and Google will love.
Today, we’ll focus on the latter, because a great blog post is nothing if it isn’t built on the foundation of great SEO techniques.
Here’s five of our favourite SEO tips for blogging that are so simple you can implement them today - without expert assistance.
Don’t just blog for the sake of it.
Sure, you’ve not published anything on the website for a couple of weeks, but if inspiration isn’t forthcoming, you’ll simply end up writing a post that won’t be picked up by search engines or your audience.
And that really is time wasted.
Only write when you have a solid topic idea in your head.
Let’s use this post as an example.
It consists of the following elements:
Google pays attention to this stuff. A poorly constructed blog post that’s just a glob of text won’t perform very well at all.
Think carefully about the length of your content, too. You’re reading a ‘standard’ length blog post here, but long-form content might be required and more beneficial from a ranking perspective if you’re covering a particularly complex topic.
In this post, we’ve used what are known as ‘H1’ and ‘H2’ headings, because we know search engines have a far easier job of crawling through web pages if they’re clearly structured from a technical perspective.
Thankfully, you shouldn’t need to worry about the code involved, because your website’s content management system should present heading options as ‘heading 1’ and ‘heading 2’.
Use them!
Before you hit that ‘publish’ button, ask a friend or colleague to have a read through your blog post.
Does it make sense?
If a human being can’t fathom what it is you’re trying to say, Google will have a hard job of it, too.
Choose people who you can trust to be honest and act on their feedback.
An easy one, this.
Don’t copy and paste from other blogs or loosely rewrite someone else’s hard work. Ever.
Google is far smarter than that - as is your audience.
Only write original, relevant content if you want to be found and avoid ranking penalties.
Keep the above tips handy while writing content for your business website.
Just bear in mind that this is in no way a definitive list, and we’ll cover more advice in future posts!
And, if you feel you do need some help from the bods who know SEO like the back of their hand, get in touch today!