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Eight tips for creating SEO-friendly blog posts

Blogging is on the rise with more and more businesses writing content to promote their products.  According to blogging.org, in 2012 there were 42 million blogs in the US alone with 500,000 new posts daily, and this number will certainly have increased.  This means it is more important than ever to ensure your blog is search engine friendly.  Here are some tips to help get your business noticed.

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Keyword research

To get your blog featured high up on search engines, it is essential that you do keyword research. You are probably already using them without realising, but you need to make sure you are using the most relevant keywords you can.

Make the most of the keywords

Once you’ve identified the most useful keywords you can use, you need to start utilising them. This does not mean using as many keywords can you can, as many times as you can, all this will result in is your blog being penalised for keyword stuffing. A couple of strategically placed keywords will be far more effective.  Make sure to keep it natural.

The best place to use your keywords is in the title, headings, the first and last sentences, the anchor text or in tags.  The most effective place for Google to pick up on a keyword is in the first 65 characters of your headline.  Including it near the start of your headline also ensures it the keyword isn’t cut off in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Use links

Whenever you reference bloggers or articles, it is important that you include links to their pages. This prevents your blog being accused of plagiarism but also alerts other bloggers to your page, and if you’re lucky, they might link you back. Links will also help you rank higher as your posts will appear more official.

Utilise social media

To help your blog’s popularity and to help it move up on Google’s search engines, make sure you tweet bloggers when you have mentioned them in your post in the hope of a retweet. Use all your social media platforms to promote your blog and helpfully you will be noticed by the right people.

Optimise image usage

Search engines favour images with alt text as this tells them what the image is. When writing the alt text of an image, make sure that you include keywords to improve your blog’s SEO. Granted, this won’t be the make or break of your blog, but it will make some difference, and everything that helps is certainly worth doing.

Make sure your website is responsive

Google favours mobile-friendly sites, and as more and more bloggers are ensuring their blogs are responsive, you can’t afford to fall behind. You need to ensure you are competing on the same level if you want to be successful.

Optimise your URL and meta-description on every post
Search engines use your URL when ranking your blog and will favour URLs that are easy for visitors to digest. Similarly, your meta description appears in the SERPs and tells searchers what your post is about so they can determine if it is worth reading. If you utilise this, you could bring more viewers to your blog and move up the results page.

Finally…

It is essential that you keep on top of the things that search engines value as this is constantly changing. In order to make your blog a success, you need to stay ahead of the game.

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