What Is Blog SEO?
Blog SEO involves optimizing a blog’s content, site architecture, and HTML code for search engines. Common activities related to blog SEO include on-page optimization, plugin installation, enhancement of page loading speed, and internal linking.
Why Is Blog SEO Important?
Blogs heavily rely on search engines as a vital source of traffic.
SEO was found to be the third most valuable source of traffic among over 1000 bloggers in a recent survey, following closely behind email marketing.
The power of SEO is demonstrated through our own blog. Although we do obtain a considerable amount of traffic from Twitter, LinkedIn, email, and direct traffic, these sources collectively account for the majority of our monthly traffic.
Google sends more than 396,000 visitors to us every month.
Our site’s growth would have been considerably slower if we had not implemented blog SEO.
If you are interested in learning how to optimize your blog for SEO, you can find these tried and tested SEO tips.
Best Practices
Find One Main Keyword For Each Post
When publishing a blog post, ensure that it is optimized for a single keyword.
Google and other search engines become confused when you optimize your post using multiple keywords, as they are unable to determine the actual topic of your content.
If you concentrate on a specific keyword, Google will be able to comprehend that your post pertains to that particular subject with ease.
To begin, your initial step is to identify a primary keyword for your post.
If your blog is new, I suggest prioritizing long tail keywords initially due to their lower competitiveness.
To discover long tail keywords, enter a word or phrase into the Google search bar…
Make sure to consider the suggested keywords by Google that are displayed below the search bar.
You can also utilize a helpful and free tool called Answer The Public to assist you in thinking step by step.
This tool provides a list of question-based keywords that you can use to optimize your post.
In addition to keyword research, this tool is excellent for generating ideas for content topics.
Optimize Your Blog Post
Once you have discovered a long tail keyword, your aim is to optimize your post by focusing on that specific term.
It is unnecessary to excessively use your keyword on your page. This practice is referred to as “keyword stuffing”. While keyword stuffing used to be effective in the past, today it can have more negative consequences than positive ones.
When considering the flow of your thoughts, rephrase the following text while keeping the meaning intact. Avoid introducing new details and do not eliminate any information. Rather, aim to incorporate your designated keyword in a few crucial locations within your webpage.
Title and Title Tag
The majority of CMSs, such as WordPress, typically include a title field positioned at the top of the post.
If you desire to incorporate your keyword into your blog post title and the title tag of your page, make sure to follow a logical thought process.
Some WordPress themes and plugins will automatically set your post as your title tag, while others will not. Therefore, it is important to verify your page’s HTML to ensure that your keyword is included in the title.
Intro and Conclusion Sections
As you write your blog post, it is important to think logically and break down the information into step-by-step instructions. When rephrasing the text, ensure that the meaning remains the same without the addition or removal of any information. Additionally, it is crucial to include your keyword in the introduction and conclusion of your blog post.
Based on my experience, incorporating your keyword in these two crucial areas slightly enhances on-page SEO.
H1, H2 and H3 Subheadings
Rephrase the text: Title: Step-by-Step Approach to Rephrase Text while Maintaining Meaning Heading 1: Introduction Heading 2: Step-by-Step Rephrasing Process In order to rephrase a given text without altering its meaning, it is essential to follow a systematic step-by-step approach. This approach aims to maintain the original information while presenting it in a slightly different manner. By adhering to this process, the rephrased text can effectively convey the same message as the original, while ensuring consistency and accuracy. Heading 2: Step 1 – Understanding the Original Text Heading 3: Analyzing the Content and Structure To begin the rephrasing process, the first step involves carefully comprehending the original text. It is crucial to understand the content and structure of the text to ensure an accurate rephrasing. Heading 2: Step 2 – Identifying Important Keywords Heading 3: Identifying Key Phrases or Words Once the original text is thoroughly understood, the next step is to identify the essential keywords or phrases. These keywords will serve as the foundation for the rephrased text, as they encapsulate the main ideas and information presented in the original. Heading 2: Step 3 – Paraphrasing Sentence by Sentence Heading 3: Rewriting Sentences with Synonyms The subsequent step involves paraphrasing the original text sentence by sentence. This requires replacing words and phrases with suitable synonyms while maintaining the original context. By utilizing synonyms, the rephrased text ensures a similar meaning while providing fresh and varied expressions. Heading 2: Step 4 – Ensuring Coherence and Clarity Heading 3: Verifying Sentence Flow and Understandability After paraphrasing each sentence, it is essential to review the rephrased text for coherence and clarity. The sentences should flow smoothly, maintaining logical connections between ideas, and remain easily understandable to the reader. Heading 2: Step 5 – Comparison with Original Text Heading 3: Cross-Checking for Consistency Finally, in order to ensure the maintained meaning, the rephrased text should be compared with the original. By cross-checking both versions, it can be confirmed whether the intended meaning has been preserved, and any necessary adjustments can be made accordingly. Heading 1: Conclusion In conclusion, following a step-by-step approach ensures the accurate rephrasing of a text while maintaining its original meaning. By carefully understanding the original text, identifying essential keywords, paraphrasing sentence by sentence with synonyms, ensuring coherence and clarity, and cross-checking with the original, the resulting rephrased text effectively retains the same message.
Your post title is automatically set as an H1 in most WordPress themes.
However, like your title tag, it is necessary to examine your page’s HTML to ensure this.
Title: The Importance of Step-by-Step Thinking: Adding Subheadings to Enhance Structure Introduction: In this post, we highlight the significance of step-by-step thinking and demonstrate how including subheadings can effectively enhance the structure and organization of written content. Importance of Step-by-Step Thinking: By employing a step-by-step thinking approach, we can effectively break down complex ideas or tasks into smaller, manageable parts. This method allows for a better understanding of the subject matter, facilitates problem-solving, and encourages logical reasoning. Benefits of Including Subheadings: Adding subheadings within a post or article serves as a valuable tool to improve readability and comprehension. These subheadings often act as signposts, guiding the reader through the text while also indicating the main topics or concepts discussed in each section. How to Incorporate Subheadings: When incorporating subheadings into your post, it is essential to choose meaningful keywords that accurately represent the content to follow. This ensures that readers can quickly identify the main themes or ideas within your writing. Maintaining a consistent style and formatting for your subheadings further aids in creating a cohesive structure. Conclusion: In conclusion, step-by-step thinking allows us to navigate intricate subjects effectively. By complementing this approach with the use of subheadings, we enhance the structure and organization of our written content, thereby improving readability and comprehension for our audience.
As you optimize your blog content, remember to keep in mind that these tips are the most important SEO best practices.
However, their efforts only touch the surface. In terms of on-page SEO, it is also possible to enhance your page’s alt text, sitespeed, responsive design, mobile optimization, and various other factors.
Setup SEO Plugins
Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, and WordPress are all included in the list.
All of them assert that they are “SEO friendly” from the beginning.
Even though each one is SEO-friendly, they typically require assistance in the form of an SEO plugin or extension.
Yoast SEO is the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress, followed by All In One SEO and RankMath.
Almost every blogging platform has similar SEO plugins available.
The specific plugin is not of much importance. What matters is that you utilize the appropriate SEO plugins for your blog.
Specifically, you are looking for plugins that have the following qualities:
- Help you optimize your title and description tags: That way, you can write SEO-optimized titles and meta descriptions.
- Create a sitemap: An XML sitemap helps search engines find all of your blog’s post and pages
- Make it easy to create an SEO-friendly site structure: For blogs, this means being able to easily noindex pages and posts that you don’t want search engines to index.
- Compress images for speed: Page speed won’t make or break your rankings. But fast-loading pages can give you a slight boost.
When you have installed those plugins, it is time to…
Put Your Blog On a Subfolder
There is no need to worry about this if your blog is your site.
What if your business is a SaaS one? Or perhaps you offer services?
Where should your blog be placed?
In the past, individuals would commonly place their blogs on subdomains in this manner:
Rephrased: The website address blog.example.com remains unchanged and no additional information has been added or removed.
It appears that subdomains do not benefit SEO.
Instead, what you want to do is place your blog in a subfolder, similar to the example provided.
Please rephrase the text below, without adding or removing any information, while maintaining the same meaning: The URL for our blog is example.com/blog.
Content Optimization Goals
Prior to devising your content optimization strategy, it is imperative to compile a list of your content objectives. Subsequently, your course of action should align with the desired goals you aim to accomplish.
There are four categories under which content optimization goals can fall.
- Achieve Top Rankings: This is, perhaps, the most common goal of every content optimization strategy. You should list this goal if you wish to achieve the top organic rankings for your target keywords.
- Improve Branding: Another goal of content optimization can be branding. This goal is for when you want your brand to remain highlighted in the SERPs for every keyword that is significant in the buyer journey.
- Increase Traffic: Another common goal is to increase traffic to your website. This goal helps improve both branding and conversions.
- Increase Revenue: The end goal of every content marketing strategy is higher conversions. You should list this goal if you wish to acquire relevant traffic that converts easily.
How to Get Started With Content Optimization
Are you now convinced that content optimization is an indispensable part of your marketing strategy?
You have recorded your objectives for content marketing as well.
Without wasting any more time, let’s commence the process of content optimization.
Here are some of the main strategies to consider when optimizing your content for improved organic rankings.
1) Optimize for Content Decay
Content decay occurs when you cease to revise or update the older content on your website, leading to a decrease in traffic to these pages.
There are several reasons why content decay might occur.
- Your competitors are regularly publishing fresh content
- There are new updates happening in your niche that you haven’t included in your older content.
- You have stopped promoting the older content, resulting in loss of new links.
Content decay is a significant reason behind the decline in rankings, as all these factors contribute to it.
To identify the pages that have experienced a decrease in traffic, one effective method is utilizing a Content Decay tool.
You have access to both the percentage and the session count of traffic loss compared to the peak.
To regain the lost traffic, here are a few steps you can consider taking:
- Check the current ranking of the pages that have declined in rankings. Start with your top-ranking 10-20 pages and analyze them for declines in traffic.
- Update the content by adding around 1,000-2,000 words of fresh content after analyzing the top-ranking content in that category.
- Add a video to increase time spent on the site or page by your visitors.
- Improve the page speed because loading time is one of the most significant factors of Core Web Vitals, which is a vital part of the Page Experience Update. Pages that load faster offer a better browsing experience, and Google promotes instant loading pages in the search results.
- Apply the skyscraper technique to add something unique to your pages that the top-ranking pages don’t have. This could be a table, an infographic, a video, some fresh examples, etc.
- Research some latest developments around the topic and refresh the posts with new and relevant information.
- Start promoting the pages again to gain new links. Remember, links remain one of the most crucial ranking factors.
2) Do Competitor Research
Competitor research is an essential marketing strategy that involves closely examining your competitors to understand their content marketing tactics, as well as their strengths and weaknesses. This is done with the aim of enhancing your own content strategies.
To optimize content, it is crucial to conduct research. Follow these steps: enter your seed keyword into Google and examine the top 2-3 competitors.
You should focus on these things that require your attention.
- The Domain Authority (DA), Page Authority (PA), Trust Flow (TF), and Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR)
- Quality and comprehensiveness of content
- Word count of the posts
- Freshness of content
- USAge of keywords in the title, description, headings, and main content body
- Number of backlinks
- Number of social shares
- E.A.T. score (here is a useful E.A.T. checklist that covers all the major factors), which stands for:
- Expertise: The page needs to have quality content written by an expert writer with proven experience, knowledge or qualifications.
- Authority: The site itself needs to have some authority on the subject.
- Trustworthiness: The site needs to have other authoritative links pointing to it from similar, trusted websites in their industry.
Refresh your content becomes easier once you list all the comparison metrics.
3) Follow the Single Grain Blog Updating Guidelines
To ensure you maximize the value of your content’s return on investment, it is essential to consistently update every post on your blog. This practice will help you attract new traffic and recover any previously lost traffic.
Single Grain has compiled six-step blog updating guidelines that consist of proven methods to increase website traffic through updating existing blog posts.
- Rewrite the intro and conclusion because both these sections offer a summary of what is present in the article. These sections should be engaging and actionable.
- Pick the weak sections in the article and replace them with stronger variations that are helpful for the reader. You can also combine 2-3 points under a single point to make it stronger.
- Write as much as required depending on the topic. No specific word count, just make sure your article does full justice and offers comprehensive, accurate, up-to-date, unique, and complete information.
- Update all the references used in your article and point to sources no more than 2 years old.
- Replace all the older or irrelevant images with new ones.
- Replace any older examples with fresh ones.
