Are you struggling to attract visitors to your blog? The problem may lie in the way you are optimising your blog posts. In many cases, a blog post author will simply write a blog post and publish it without thinking through what is required to attract the attention of the search engines. Below are some of the most effective ways you can optimise all of your blog posts.
Reviewing What Has Worked Well & Planning Your Optimised Blog Posts
Every successful project starts with a well thought-out plan. Optimising your blog posts is no exception. However before you build you plan how to you know where to focus your efforts?
Reviewing your existing posts to see what your readers like and what they are less interested in is a great place to start. Downloading your blog data from Google Analytics into Excel and analysing it should take you less then 15 minutes so this isn’t a time consuming task. If you’re unsure how to do this, this great article on using Excel with Google Analytics will get you started.
Once you know what has worked well for you in the past you are in a very good position to plan your future posts. There is a wide range of tools are available to help you create your plan and record your progress as you add optimised posts to your blog. Many people use Trello or Basecamp for this.
Include Optimised Images
Adding an image or images to a blog post is essential. It not only makes your blog post look more appealing but it is also a factor the search engines take into account when they rank online content. Once you decide to add an image it also has to be optimised. The image should be fast loading and you need to rename it so that it includes a keyword or phrase that is related to the topic of your blog post. The image’s alternative text and description should also be optimised in this way, so that every aspect of the image is related to your post content.
Keywords and LSI Keywords
Keywords are central to this exercise. It’s vital to include relevant keywords and phrases in your content that people will search for and that are seen to be relevant by the search engines. Many blog owners only focus on the main keywords in their blog posts, but you also need to include related keywords, which are also known as LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords. Doing this covers more searches and the search engines have a better understanding of what your blog content is all about.
Linking
The internet consists of billions of links. Without links, you would not be able to go from one website to another, or from one web page to another web page inside a website. This is why the search engines reward websites that link to internal and external web pages. Each blog post should link to another webpage on your blog and you should also use citation links that link to web pages on other websites.
Social Interaction
The way people interact with a blog post can be recorded and has become an important factor when search engines rank a website. Encouraging comments and encouraging interaction with your blog posts on social media are two of the most effective ways to do this and to build your fan base.
Taking the time to optimise your blog posts can reap huge rewards. The more content you publish and the more it is optimised, the more likely you are to attract visitors who are extremely interested in what you have to say.
