Local SEO Tips Assist In Top Rankings
Make Sure Your Business Blog Posts Are SEO-Friendly
Starting a blog for your business is a great idea. It allows you to connect with your customers, provide useful information and promote your products and services all in one easy, convenient place. More important than these factors, however, is that a blog affords you a valuable opportunity to strengthen your SEO efforts and boost your search engine rankings. Every post you make is a chance to work in your keywords, increase links and bolster your exposure on the web.
Not sure how to go about making your blog posts SEO friendly? Focus on these five elements:
1. Keyword Density
Don’t over-stuff your content with keywords. For one, it’s confusing and off-putting for readers; if your content isn’t easy to read or doesn’t flow smoothly, it will likely cause readers to go running for the door – and never come back. It could also end up hurting your SEO in the end; search engines may flag your site as spam if you have too many keywords and not enough quality information on it. Try to aim for about one keyword per every 100 words. Sometimes, two is OK, as long as you aren’t cramming too many into one page or block of content.
2. Titles & Headers
You can really boost your SEO efforts by working keywords into your post titles, headers and sub-headers. Copy that’s located within <title>, <h1>, <h2> and <h3> tags is basically search engine gold; Google, Bing and Yahoo all give great weight to these areas, so when you include a keyword or two, it can make a huge difference on where you show up.
3. Images
In addition to regular website searches, most search engines also offer an image search function, which allows users to locate images or photos, click on them and visit the source site. This is a great opportunity to, yet again, increase visibility for your site. Make sure your images show up in search by optimizing the alt and title tags; insert one or two keywords or phrases into each. You can also optimize your captions, which could boost your on-page SEO.
4. Links
Links are a huge factor in how well a site ranks in search rankings; the more links coming into your site, the better. You can help increase these by including internal links (links to other pages on your site or previous posts) on each blog post you create. Additionally, you can also optimize those links by ensuring you use keywords in the anchor text and link title.
5. Cross-promotion
Once your entry has been posted, you can still continue to improve SEO by cross-promoting your post on other websites. Use social tools to share your links, and take advantage of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Instagram to spark interest in your content. The more sites you use, the more inbound links there are to your content. Be sure to use keywords when sharing your content, too. That only increases the value of those links you’ve created.
