Small Business Blogging: Optimizing Your Blogs for SEO

As you’ve probably already heard, blogging is a small business marketing necessity. While blogging, it is important to optimize your blog for SEO to improve your chances of being found online.

Here are some great SEO blogging tips: 

1) Do your research
Find keywords related to your topic. Using keywords relevant to the topic that you’re writing about will come naturally, but there are various tools such as the Google Adwords Keyword tool that can help you find additional words and phrases to add to the ones you’ve already thought of.

2) Utilize keywords throughout your post
Now that you’ve found the keywords you’re going to use, include them in areas of your blog such as your headings, subheadings, title, anchor text, and intro sentence. However, don’t overdo it- using too many can actually hurt your rankings and annoy your followers.

3) Optimize your images
Web crawlers do not have the ability to read images, they read the alt text provided that describes the image. Therefore, it is important to use relevant keywords in your image’s alt text for SEO purposes.

4) Reference others with links
When you are summarizing another blog or mentioning another blogger, ensure that you include a link to that information. Not only is it good etiquette, but it also creates an opportunity to acquire a link back, which can help you rank higher in search results if it is a quality site.

5) Give readers the opportunity to subscribe to your blog
Offer viewers the option of subscribing to your blogs by email. They will be sent notifications of new posts without ever having to check your site.

6) Use social media to broaden the reach of your blog posts
Utilize your Facebook, Twitter, and other sites you have established a presence on to promote your blogs.

To learn about these tips in more detail, visit this blog