So you’ve got a blog. Awesome! Now, is that blog doing anything for your business? If your answer is, “no” or “not enough,” that’s likely because you have yet to perfect the modern art of optimizing your blog content for your digital marketing efforts.
And believe it or not, it’s not as difficult as you think (of course, if you want an easier method, just let us do it!). Here are a few tips to get started.
Optimizing Your Existing Blog Content
Be Methodical with Meta Data
If you’re at all familiar with SEO, you likely know that meta information is a big key to getting some love from Google. That said, when it comes to meta data, implementation is key.
You can actually do yourself a disservice if you’re not strategic about your meta information. Most importantly, you need to ensure your meta titles and descriptions include at least one strategic keyword and no more than 55 characters.
Since the meta title is also displayed as “clickable” from a search engine, you’ll want to make sure it doesn’t read like a robot either.
Work on the Content, Too
Optimization isn’t all about the backend. Your content itself needs to be optimized according to your goals.
Naturally, as you write about a relevant topic, you’re going to get some organic SEO out of the content, but it’s helpful to take a look through your content with SEO in mind in order to insert or refine keywords that are relevant to your customers.
That said, keywords and phrases that end up sounding super awkward aren’t worth the SEO boost, because your customers will see right through it.
There’s an art to optimizing content, but starting with incorporating a few strategic keywords is a great first move.
Don’t Neglect the Imagery
Images can really make (or break!) a blog post. If you’re featuring photographs or images (and you should be), it’s also important to make sure you’re including image alt tags (always) and captions (when possible) – and you should make sure you’re keeping them concise.
Stuffing image alt tag or caption with keywords or phrases could actually make search engines consider your image spam – and that won’t do you (or your customers) any good.
Create Appropriate Links
Got a blog post that isn’t linking? Fix it! A best practice in the industry is using strategic links within your post to link to relevant content on your page or on trusted, strategic third-party pages.
Additionally, once linked, you’re not home free. Broken links or links to inappropriate pages will annoy your customers AND the search engines. Frequently “audit” your blog content to make sure your links are still current.
Share, Share, Share
The very purpose of your blog content is to get read by your customers (and all those potential customers). An easy way to expand your readership is to provide social media sharing tools on your blog posts.
Allowing an easy, one-click way for your customers or employees to share your post on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or any other social media platforms is a great way to help your content get seen. It’s also a great idea to provide links that enable your reader to follow or like your business’s social media page or account.
Take Your Blog Content to the Next Level
Are you ready to take that blog content and really make it work for your business? It’s not as difficult as you think; give us a call and we’ll help you get started – now!
