Optimize Your Blog Posts for Search Engines With These 6 Easy Steps

Writing blog entries is one of the best components of a successful content marketing campaign. A new blog entry enhances the credibility of your website in so many ways:

• Every time you write a new blog entry, you create a new indexed page for your website.


• You also are creating relevant information for people to share on social media.


• The more your blog links travel around the social-sphere, the more traffic you get to your website.


• Having so many visitors to your blog page (even if that’s the only page they visit) increases brand awareness for your company name and blog.

With all this SEO potential floating around your blog, you definitely want to make sure that you pay attention to critical areas of the page as you post. Making sure that your blog post is optimized for search engines will only help you in your quest to dominate the Internet (casual) and increase brand awareness for your company.

Here is a handy list of SEO points to touch when posting your blog. For all those HubSpot COS users out there, you can find them on the bottom right hand side of your blog – just look for the “SEO View” button.

1. Select a focus keyword (or keywords) for your post. Pick the main topic for your blog and mention it in the page title, throughout the content of the copy, the URL and in the meta description (if possible). If you need to pick more than one focus keyword, that’s fine too – just don’t go overboard. For example, my focus keywords for this blog entry are “SEO” and “Search Engines”. However, it’s really important that you do not keyword stuff your content. If the focus keywords don’t naturally fit into these areas of your post, don’t force it.


2. Pay attention to character limits. For the page title, do not exceed 70 characters. In the meta description, don’t go over 150 characters. This includes spaces. Search engines only show this number of characters, so it’s best to keep them simple and to-the-point so that your readers can easily tell what the page is about.


3. Add internal links. If you are writing and you reference an older blog entry or a service that you provide, create an internal link to those pages. This creates more “link juice” on your website.


4. Add an image. People love pictures. So do search engines. Add an image, and be sure to add an alt text to the image. Alt text for images can be up to 125 characters, but I recommend keeping it to 6 words or less. Include that focus keyword if it describes the image well.


5. Check out the URL. A lot of blogs will auto generate a URL based on the title of your blog. Take a look at it and make sure that it has a keyword in it if possible. Search engines take a close look at URLs, so you should too.


6. Add a Meta description. Meta descriptions are valuable to the human who is looking for your page. They provide a brief description of the page so they user can have a better idea of what the page is about. Write 1-2 sentences about your blog entry, include the focus keyword if possible, and boom! You’ve got your Meta description.

Bonus! One last marketing tip for blogs: add a CTA to your blog! If you don’t nudge your readers to take action once they’ve read your blog, it’s just a dead end. Give your blog readers a place to go after they’ve read all of your interesting tips, facts and news.

Following these few steps when posting a blog entry can greatly help your site with Organic Search. Be sure to share that blog entry to social media sites and include them in your Email Blasts, so that you attract more visits to your website and also boost your social media program.

Have some more SEO questions? Click the button below to read answers to some FAQ’s about SEO.

Optimize Your Blog Posts for Search Engines With These 6 Easy Steps