Tell us if this sounds familiar:
You spend hours brainstorming a blog post idea that you know will add value to your audiences’ lives. You work your pants off trying to write an engaging article and craft a magnetic headline. Satisfied with the result, you publish your new post, secretly hoping that a sudden surge of visitors will flood your site.
And, then you wait. And you wait. And, you wait some more.
Despite your efforts, you don’t see any increase in traffic.
What went wrong?
In this article, we’re going to teach you how to make your blog post more SEO-friendly.
1. Focus on One or Two Long-Tail Keywords
Optimizing your content for SEO doesn’t mean that you must use as many keywords as possible. Quite the opposite of that!
Put yourself in your audiences’ shoes and think about the key terms they might be using when searching for the topic you’ve covered in your post. Use tools like Google AdWords Keyword Planner to get an idea of how your keywords will perform.
As a rule of thumb, don’t focus on more than one or two long-tail keywords. That way, you can ensure that the visitors that land on your page will be more qualified.
2. Include These Keywords in Key Areas in Your Post
Now that you have your primary keywords, it’s time to incorporate them into your content.
There are four key areas where you should include your keywords to ensure that your blog post gets picked up by Google crawlers:
- Headline
- Headers and body
- Meta description
- URL
3. Optimize Your Meta Description
There’s a bit of controversy regarding Meta descriptions. While some people ignore them completely, others tend to overstuff them with keywords. But, if you were to ask any professional Dallas SEO company, they’d tell you that if done correctly, Meta descriptions could help you sell your content.
Sure, the Meta description doesn’t affect your ranking, but a well-written one could convince searchers to read your post.
Include one or two keywords to help Google understand what the article is about and index it accordingly. Craft a compelling description and give searchers a clear benefit to why they should read your post.
4. Optimize Your Images
Google needs an alt-text to understand your images and display them in search results. Sure, changing the name of your pictures from “IMG123.jpg” to “tips-SEO-friendly-content.jpg” can be time-consuming, but the results are well worth it. Properly optimized images can help you boost your ranking.
5. Link Internally
While backlinks are a core component of SEO, linking internally is just as important. Here’s the thing: by linking to other pages on your website, you’re not only helping visitors navigate your page but also spread page authority throughout the site.
Do you need help optimizing your content? D6 Interactive, a Dallas SEO company, can help you create web pages that will please both search engines and your audience.
For more information, visit D6 Interactive.