How to Optimize Your Blogs for SEO

Blogs have been around basically since the internet has started. Blogs have always been a way for people to share their opinion on a topic or answer questions people are searching for. Blogs can be written by an individual person on their own site or a company writing about a topic in their field. The one thing that you hear all the time working with companies is “does anyone read these things” or “I do not know why we need to blog. People will find us in other ways.” Blogs are something that work in tandem with your SEO strategy and are the extra push you will need to get to the next page. Below I will provide tips on how to optimize your blogs to rank from an SEO standpoint.

Create an Author With an Author Page

From an SEO standpoint, blogs have become almost invaluable since the Medic update at the end of 2018. Google medic took into consideration the reputation of the website and the content tying back to the author of the article. For example, many company blogs were being published by the company and not to a person. Google now requires that any content under the blog page be tied to an actual person with expertise in the field.

The first step is to change the author of the blog to a person and have that user link to a dedicated author page. Within that author page, the person must have a bio and a link of all of their accreditations on the page. Google needs to see that the content that is being produced can be trusted and provides the best experience for its users. This should be your starting point for optimizing your blogs for SEO.

Optimize Your URL Structure

Google is constantly looking to provide the best experience for its users by providing the most trustworthy content. One way to do this for Google is to make it easy by optimizing your URLs for the topic you are writing about. The blog URL needs to be short, direct and include the keywords/topic you are writing about. For example, I am writing a blog about email outreach. The URL should include the category and the topic included so the blog about email outreach should be: www.techwyse.com/blog/content-marketing/email-outreach/.

The URL clearly identifies that the link is under the blog section of the website and the URL has the topic and keywords in the link. As much as you want to make life easier for your users to find the content, search engines also appreciate making the URLS as easy as possible with all the pages they have to crawl. To learn more about URL optimization and structure, Moz has a handy guide to follow.

Stay Focused With the Keywords

Back in the day when SEO optimization started, keyword stuffing was a common practice to instantly rank for many keywords. The search engine algorithms are more sophisticated than ever so the tags and the keywords need to be focused and match the content on the page. The best practice for blogs is to write for a specific reason and keep it focused on those keywords. When optimizing your keywords, focus on long-tail keywords as they are usually what ties into the search people are making. The best example for this is for the wisdom tooth extraction example above.

The blog I would write would be about wisdom tooth extraction and what to expect after surgery. The long tail keyword you should be optimizing, in this case, would be “wisdom tooth recovery” or “what is the recovery time after wisdom tooth extraction?”. The blog should have a dedicated header with the recovery process with images and alt tags that match. Keep it simple and keep it focused with the content you are producing, instead of spreading yourself too wide.

Interlink With the Content

The same point mentioned in the URL structure section applies here, make it easy for the search engine to trust you are the expert on that topic. Throughout your blog, you should be hyperlinking to other pages within your website. Interlinking within a blog not only builds up your authority on a topic but also improves website dwell time. The longer that people stay on the site, the better you will rank online.

It is important to not overdo it with the interlinking. Having 8 interlinks instead of 40 is better to keep people on the page and not send them all of the site. Similar to keywords, keep it focused and keep it simple. You should be driving the traffic to the blog and interlink to build up the authority.

Optimize for Mobile

Since the beginning of 2018, Google has been indexing for mobile first rather than desktop for websites. This means that the mobile experience should be a priority not only for blogs but your whole site. To start, Google has an online tool to test your mobile-friendliness of either a website or page. Ensure that the pages have the optimal site speed so that the page is loaded quickly and is complete when the user loads in. This year people want to get the information they need and do not want to wait for a site to load. If the information is not easy to access and it has a poor page structure (text too small, no spacing etc), users will leave to another page without hesitation.

The strategies mentioned above are all quick fixes that will set you up for success. Keep the strategy simple and focused. Blogs have always been viewed by many as nice to have but not a need to have. In 2019, blogs are a need to have if you want to see steady growth in your digital presence. At Techwyse, we not only create the blogs for you, but we follow the best practice when it comes to organic optimization. Feel free to reach out to us at 416-410-7090 or by email at info@techwyse.com for a consultation on your business.