Successful marketers know that search engine optimization (SEO) is incredibly important for marketing strategy. Optimizing web pages makes your website gain more visibility among search engine users looking for keywords connected to your brand and services. This includes your blog posts. For this reason, optimizing blog articles must be done with care and diligence. As you create your next post, use this blog SEO checklist as a quick guide to maximizing your efforts.

 

Long-Tail Keyword Phrases ✓

Choose keywords relevant to your content that fits naturally. Using long-tail keyword phrase will more likely result in the traffic you are looking for because they will be visitors searching for more specific information.

Learn the 5 Qualities of Good Keyword Phrases.

 

Keyword Phrases Included Your Content ✓

Once you have a keyword phase chosen, be sure to include it as is in your header and the body of your content. The essential places to include keywords are headers, body, meta description, and URL.

 

Header

The header is the first thing a search engine users will see in their page results, so incorporating the keyword phrase ensures it’s known relevance to the visitor. Make sure the keyword phrase is included in the first 65 characters of the header because any more characters will likely be cut off by Google in their SERPs.

 

Body

When including keyword phrases in the body of your content, be sure not to just drop it in somewhere randomly. Take time to incorporate it as seamlessly as possible to flow with the rest of your writing and maintain reader-friendliness.

 

URL

Search engines also look at the URL of the blog post to determine what your article is about. In fact, it’s one of the first things crawled on a page, so take the opportunity to optimize the URL on each blog post that you publish.  

 

Meta Description

A meta description is a supplementary text that appears in SERPs underneath the header to indicate to readers what the content is about. This additional set of text gives the search engine user a clearer idea of whether your article is the information they are looking for and if they are going to click on it. Since your keyword phrase is the representative of the information included in your content, it is important to include it in the meta description.

 

Optimized Images ✓

In addition to text, blog posts should contain images that enhance what your content is saying.

However, search engines do not simply look for images; they look for images with alt text to say what the image is about and thus can be found in searches. Using alt text with your images also facilitates a better user experience because it will display in the image container if the image itself cannot be found or loaded.

 

Effective Use of Topic Tags ✓

Many people think having a large number of topic tags will be better for the content. In actuality, too many similar tags can actually be harmful to the SEO of your content because search engines may penalize you for having duplicate content. For example, “blog post”, “blog”, and “blogging” are too alike to one another to be included on the same article.