A lot goes into making a blog post successful. While part of this success is dependent on how well you write your blog, how large your target audience is, and how good you are at promoting your content, another large part of having a successful blog post has to do with its ability to be found. For this reason, knowing how to properly optimize your blog for search is of the utmost importance. These more mathematical, IT parts of your blog shouldn’t be forgotten. To help make it easier for your blogs to be found, here are some tips for optimizing blogs you write so readers can more easily find and share them.
Make Your Images Searchable
Although Google’s search algorithm is very advanced, it hasn’t yet figured out a way to make images searchable without including certain tags with your images. By naming your images correctly and making them searchable, you’re letting Google or other search engines know that the image you’ve chosen for your blog is relevant to your blog topic. Kelly Thomas Mango of OpenVine.com states that a best practice for naming images is to include your target keywords in what you name the actual image file and to also give the image a brief but keyword focused description in the alternative text field. By doing this, you will ensure that search engines can identify the images you’re using.
Link to Your Other Relevant Posts
A major part of SEO is related to becoming known for a certain subject. By being a thought leader in your industry, you will have more credibility given to you from both search engines and readers, which will bring more readers to your blogs as a result. Once great way to take advantage of a previously successful post is to link a newer post to that older post. Marieke van de Rakt of Yoast tells readers that by including this SEO practice in your blog optimization, your post will be stronger because your linked blogs will show that you’re an authority on the subject to which you’re referring.
Craft Solid Title Tags
Having a good title tag is arguably the most important thing you can do to make your blog post optimized for SEO. When users search for something, the search engine looks for relevant matches by looking at the title tag of the page, so make sure you include the topic or keywords you’re trying to target in your title tag. Ken Lyons of Search Engine Watch also advises people to vary their title tag from their blog’s title in order to take advantage of all opportunities to create relevancy for your blog post.
If you want to have a blog that gets more traffic than just your employees and Facebook friends, you’ve got to optimize it for SEO. Use these three tips to help bring more readers to your blogs than you’ve ever imagined.