Our SEO experts have got together to come up with seven easy changes you can make to your blog to optimise your content without too much additional effort.

1. Write for people first.

Let’s start by remembering who you’re meant to be writing your blog for – human readers. But let’s also remember that in a digital world we have to think about getting ranked by search engines.

So, your blog needs to strike the right balance between people and search engines.

1. Write what people want to read.

When writing a blog for people first, it goes without saying that your copy should be of interest to them. It should be original, relevant to the subject you’re writing about, and useful to the reader. (Otherwise what’s the point of writing a blog?)

Google put even more focus on this recently with the rolling out of their helpful content update which looked to penalise sites that have a high amount of unsatisfying content which had been written for search engines first.

But you also want as many people as possible to see your blog in the first place.

1. This is where the search engine stuff comes in.

When writing blog content with search engines in mind, you need to consider SEO, or search engine optimisation, the process of optimising your blog so it ranks better in search engine result pages. This means including a few things in your blog that are of interest to search engines.

The ‘people first’ factors – originality, relevance to your subject, and usefulness to the reader – are also important to search engines. Just don’t be tempted to cram too much information in; to rank better for search engines you should stay focused on the blog’s subject.

1. Choose the right keywords.

To get noticed by search engines, your blog content needs to have the right keywords in the right places. You should choose a keyword that matches the intent of your content and has the most search volume, while not being too difficult to rank.

Your keyword should appear in full in your title, your page title, your first paragraph, be repeated in your body copy occasionally, and in one subheading. Just don’t repeat your keywords too often or force them in where they don’t seem natural. Keyword stuffing can get you in trouble with the Google police so definitely err on the side of caution with this one.

1. A word about linking.

Adding links to your blog can help search engines determine the usefulness and quality of your pages. There are two types of links you should look to use – internal and external.

For external links, high-quality pages usually link to other high-quality pages, so search engines will look at your content favourably, helping you rank higher. But don’t go silly. Every external link is an opportunity for the user to leave your site so be considerate with external links and only use where it benefits the user.

For internal, you should link to other content on your site which you think may be useful to the user. As a rule of thumb, it’s recommended that you have 3 – 4 internal links in a long form of content but again it’s not something you should force.

As a side note, you should also consider the words being used to set up links. These should be relevant as it is used as another indicator to search engines of what your content is about. And for Google’s sake, don’t use ‘CLICK HERE’.

1. Add some meta data.

Meta data are snippets of code that tell search engines important information about your blog page and appear on search engine results pages.

As a minimum, you want to write and input an optimised page title and meta description to help search engines understand what your page is about and help increase the number of users clicking through from the search engine results pages.

As a rule, to avoid your meta data being truncated you should stick to 30 – 60 characters for your page title and 140 – 160 for your description.

1. Don’t forget about readability.

Finally, bear in mind that 60% of searches are now made from mobile devices with smaller screens, so it’s worth making sure your content will fit.

Last word: Simple optimisations like these can improve your blog’s user experience and help your content rank. Always keeping the user in mind will help ensure you’re making the right changes. People are your priority. And search engines are making changes to their algorithms to reflect this.

—–

If you need help using SEO to get the most from your blog content, the easy peasy way is by getting in touch with us at Harrison Carloss. We can help you to optimise existing content or, if you’re looking for a full content strategy, we can identify content gaps in your website and create a bespoke plan to help bolster your blog and show your users the content they’re looking for.