How to Optimize Your Blog Content for Search Engines

Every business blogger can benefit from good search engine visibility. Whether you use your blog for public relations or direct sales, you need to understand the basics of search engine optimization (SEO).

So in this lesson, I’m going to tell you how to optimize your blog content for better rankings in the major search engines.

In order to succeed with SEO — and blog optimization in particular — you need to have a combination of link popularity and keyword-rich content. “Link popularity” simply refers to the quantity and quality of other websites that link to yours, and it’s another lesson entirely. Today, we will focus on the second ingredient for SEO success. We will talk about things you can do to optimize your blog content.

Blog Optimization - Writing for People and Search Engines

Keep these tips in mind when writing blog posts, and you’ll be well on your way to better rankings and more traffic. Now, without further ado, let’s get to the good stuff.

• Keyword Matching – Before you start writing a new blog post, do a bit of keyword research to see what kinds of phrases people are searching (relevant to your topic). This will help you incorporate the exact phrases your target audience is searching for online. It will also give you ideas for future blog posts. You can learn more in this article about blog content and keywords.
• Specific Titles — When you create a title for your blog post, your blogging program will also use it for the HTML title of the page. This is a key element for search engine visibility, so be sure to include your chosen keywords in the title of your blog post. Ideally, those keywords should be right up front. Here are some tips for adjusting the WordPress title formula for better search engine visibility.
• Limited Scope — Blogs are designed to simplify the publishing process for you, so you can publish new content more often. This also allows you to create blog posts around specific topics, which in turn can help improve search engine performance. For example, a 300-word blog post about online payroll services would naturally be optimized for that phrase. But if I cover 12 other software products in the same blog post, I am diluting the optimization of that particular post.
• Sufficient Length — Your blog post should be as long as necessary to sufficiently cover the topic. With that being said, a short “snippet” will not do as well in search engines as a longer post. I recommend keeping all of your posts over 250 words, if possible. A longer post also lets you include multiple variations of your key phrases (see above). It also helps with the next item on the list…
• Link Worthy — In the beginning of this lesson, I talked about link popularity and how it helps with search engine ranking. Keep this in mind when writing your blog posts. Make your content useful and interesting, and more people will link to it. Sure, you have to work harder to create valuable content, and it takes time. But in the end you’ll be rewarded with better rankings and more blog traffic.
• People First — When optimizing your blog content, it’s possible to lose sight of the most important audience of all. People! Yes, it’s important to use keywords for search engine visibility, but you should never sacrifice the readability of your content for optimization. Have you ever visited a website that repeated the same phrases over and over, like a broken record? That’s an example of taking it too far.

I hope you found this lesson helpful. If you’d like to learn more about this topic, check out this tutorial on key phrase usage. And if you have any questions about content optimization, just click on the email link at the top of the website.