Our Short Answer: By adding long tail keywords that resonate with your audience, using alt text to help Google recognize images, adding videos will bring your SEO to the next level.
Google is often people’s first point of call when they are looking to find answers to their questions or help to find a solution to their pain points.
In addition to writing high quality and relevant blog posts to rank higher in organic search results, you need to apply a host of on-page SEO tactics. On- Page SEO tactics help you to gain more real estate on the search engine results page and get more relevant traffic to your website.
What Are Examples Of On Page SEO Tactics?
By using long-tail keywords, linking to authoritative websites, adding descriptions to your images, you will be more likely to show up when your target audience searches for a business like yours online.
Your content also helps increase your ranking on Google “by positioning your website as a relevant answer” to your prospects’ and customers’ questions.
Although following on-page SEO best practices help your business's visibility, keeping updated with every single change to Google's algorithms* can be challenging. However, as long as you are providing accurate, relevant, and concise-easy to digest answers that best match your audience's search intent - people and search engines will find you more easily.
*Algorithms scan and crawl content looking for important ranking factors like relevancy, high quality content, and authority.The recent trend shows that Google is looking for relevancy and search intent.
Click Here are some of the most current updates to Google algorithms
Here are some SEO Tips To Optimize Your Blog Post:
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Long Tail Keywords
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Optimizing Images
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Important Link Building Strategies
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Repurposing Blog Content
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Adding Videos To Your Blog Posts
Long Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords focus on the questions that your target audience asks or the phrases that they typically use in their search queries. Examples of long tail keywords are questions like “How to write a great blog post” or phrases like “Sell my house fast”. They are more powerful than shorter key words.
For example, “How to write a marketing email” is more effective than just adding “marketing email’ in a search query. HubSpot says that people searching for long-tail keywords will be more likely to read your entire blog post and then seek to get more information from you.
Other Advantages Of Long tail Keywords
- Less Competition: They’re easier to rank for and more competitive than shorter-tail keywords. In fact, 70% of all web searches use long tail keywords, which is why they are a key tactic for optimizing your blog posts.
- Improved Conversions: long tail keywords have better conversion rates. People that use them tend to know what they are looking for. For example, someone who searches for “Where can I find comfortable sneakers?” is more likely to make a purchase than someone typing in “comfortable sneakers”.
- More likely to be seen by your target audience: when someone uses a long tail keyword, Google typically shows more personalized results according to their location or interests. That means, two people may put in the same query, but see different results.
Where Should You Include Your Keywords?
- Title Tags are your blog’s main title or headline. They are also the first thing that someone sees on the search results page when they type a query into Google. It is a good idea to add a keyword within the first 60 characters of your title.
That’s where Google cuts titles off when displaying them on the SERP. For this reason,If you have a longer title, it is best to add a keyword at the beginning.
- Meta Description: the aim of a meta description should be to give you audience and search engines enough information about what your blog post is about. That’s why it’s a good idea to add long-tail keywords. At the same time, meta descriptions should also attract the attention of your audience by being engaging.
- Your Headers And Your Blog Post’s Main Body: Mention your keywords in natural cadences in your blog post, this means including them in your headers and the main body of your post. When you plan out a blog post, you may think how you might include keywords, but it’s not the most important thing to focus on.
Your content needs to include what your readers will find helpful, rather than cramping your blog with keywords. By writing content that provides helpful answers to your audience’s questions, you will naturally optimize your posts for keywords.
The Dangers Of Keyword Stuffing
Keyword stuffing involves adding as many keywords as possible with the sole aim to rank higher on Google. This doesn’t help your SEO, it harms it.
Search engines quickly work this tactic out and penalize you for it. The penalty could be as severe as Google removing your site or blog from the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). It doesn’t help your readers either.
You need to use your keywords in a way that doesn’t feel forced or unnatural for people reading your blogs.
Your reader’s experience is one of the most important factors that Google considers when ranking your blog content. In other words, are you offering them the value they expect to find when they click on your blog post?
A useful guideline is to focus on using one or two long tail keywords per blog post. Of course, you can add more if you wish. But, it’s a better idea to ensure the body of your blog post is narrow enough so you can spend time optimizing it for the most relevant one or two terms.
Optimize Your Images
Blog posts shouldn’t just include written content, they should also have pictures and images that help clarify what your content is all about.
However, search engines don’t look for images alone, they look for image alt text that describes what the graphic or picture is about. The clarity, specificity of your alt text description helps images and graphics rank higher on Google’s Images results page.
Image alt text creates a better user experience for people who are visually impaired when using a screen reader device. When this technology comes across an image with alt text, it reads it aloud. It gives people who rely on this technology an understanding of what an image is about.
Image alt text needs to be specific and helps give context so a search engine can read or index an image if it appears in a blog article that’s related to the same topic.
Here are a few recommendations for your alt text:
- Keep it short - under 125 characters.
- Don’t use flower language, keep your alt-text as relevant as possible to your blog post topic.
- Use keywords, but don’t overflood your alt-text with them.
- Avoid niche ambiguous acronyms that search engines won’t understand.
- Avoid beginning your description with ‘this is an image / picture of’. Google knows that it is an image, it just wants to know what the image is about.
Important Linking Strategies
Inbound Links
Inbound links are when other people add links to your blogs in their content or reshare your blog posts on social media. That sends signals to search engines that you have a top quality blog.
Interlinks
Adding older blog post links to a current blog post helps to optimize it. Internal linking is a great way to create content clusters. Content clusters create a group of several blog posts around the same topic. It helps to increase your domain authority as a subject matter expert.
When you link from one of your blog posts to another, you are telling Google that your content is highly relevant which helps you rank higher in search results.
External Links To Authoritative Sites
The external links you add to your blog posts are as important as your internal links. This is something that many bloggers neglect. They forget that their readers appreciate being directed to other relevant authoritative sources of information.
A useful practice is linking to a well ranking piece that’s generating a lot of traffic. This is because it will automatically make your blog post more visible online.
Repurposing And Removing Blog Posts
To optimize your blogs, it is a great idea to repurpose older evergreen content and get rid of blogs with outdated information. Sometimes newer posts can take time to rank on Google and build authority online. By updating your older posts you can rank faster and higher in search results.
The other plus is it takes less time and resources to create a new blog. It also increases the lifespan of older blog posts, especially if they based on topics that remain relevant over time.
You will also want to remove posts that aren’t as relevant any more. For example those with information on services or products that don’t exist anymore.
Videos In Your Blog Posts
Videos are an important part of optimizing your blog posts. Henry O’ Loughin from Buildremote marketing agency says that they’ve used video to boost the ranking of blog posts that are already showing up on Google.
For example when they have an only text blog that ranks six in search results for a targeted keyword, O'Loughlin, and his team add video and republish the post. They find that after adding a video, it increases the blog’s rank by two spots on page one of Google’s search results.
Videos not only increase dwell time - the amount of time a user spends on your blog posts,they also lower bounce rate too. According to a Wyzowl survey 80% of marketers said a video increased dwell time on their website.
This means people will spend more time on your page or blog post. This also decreases the bounce rate of people clicking away from your page or content. Neil Patel says a useful way of adding a video is to explain a specific concept that you cover in your blog post.
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