Last month we talked about whether or not an organization should blog. Knowing that timely, original, meaningful and well written blog content can be incredibly beneficial for SEO, it may very well be worth the investment.
For those of you who took the time to map out a blog strategy and have decided to move forward with launching a blog – congratulations on this exciting development! As you start developing blog content, there are many on-page SEO tactics you can implement to improve your chances of ranking well in search engine results.
How To Optimize A Blog Post For SEO
When developing blog content, keep these guidelines in mind:
- Conduct some keyword research to ensure you’re talking about your topic in the same way your audience is.
- Create an engaging blog post title incorporating targeted keyword terms.
- Aim for a minimum of 300-500 words per blog post.
- Write all original content. Do not scrape (aka, steal) content from another website – or even from your own!
- Be authentic and true to your brand and messaging.
- Break the content into smaller, more digestible chunks using headers and bullet points.
- Include at least one image with an optimized file name and image alt tag in the top right corner of the post.
- Assign proper categories and tags to every post. If your blog were a book, the categories would be the table of contents and the tags would be the index.
- Create internal links to related content, such as including “related posts” at the bottom of every blog post.
