How Does Blogging Help With SEO? Here Are 13 Ways [2023]
When you’ve started a blog, you’re probably wondering : does blogging help with SEO?
YES! Blogging does help with SEO!
Blogging boosts SEO quality by putting forward your website as one that contains the answers to a user’s questions.
If your blog has posts that use various SEO techniques, it means that your blog has a higher chance to rank on the first page of Google when a user searches for something in particular.
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is where you optimize the content you publish to rank on the first page of a search engine, e.g., Google.
You’ll get more eyes over your content, meaning more money, if you’ve got a content revenue strategy in place.
Making sure that your site is optimized for search engines will increase the overall performance of your site – which is what you want when you’ve started a blog.
So here’s a detailed breakdown of how blogging helps SEO and 13 ways on how you can do it yourself.
13 Techniques In Blogging That Help SEO
1. Using Keywords Strategically
2. Optimizing For Mobile Devices
3. Optimizing The Meta Description
4. Including Image Alt Text
5. Limiting Topic Tags
6. Using User-Friendly URLs
7. Including Related Posts
8. Reviewing Metrics
9. Organizing By Topic Clusters
10. Publishing Evergreen Content
11. Updating Existing Content
12. Aiming For Featured Content
13. Sharing On Social Media
Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no extra cost to you.
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Factors that Affect SEO
1. Using Keywords Strategically
When optimizing your content for search engines, you’ve probably heard the term keywords. SEO keywords make it possible for readers to find your site when they type in a search question in a search engine.
Keywords are one of the main elements of SEO, and if you’re looking to build your readership base, adding keywords to your content would be the first way to do it.
If you’re looking for an SEO blog for beginner’s tip, adding keywords to your content does need a level of understanding of what people coming to your site are looking for. You also need to add the right keywords so that the search engine will rank your site above your competitors.
But how do you know which keywords to use? Using a search keyword tool is probably the easiest way to find these.
Use a keyword search tool like Keysearch, which will help you find the keywords with the highest volume, but lowest competition. This is the sweet spot you’ll need when finding the right keyword to add to your site.
Note – I use Keysearch because I find it to be the best keyword tool. Use my link here and code OUTANDBEYOND, for 30% off, also a free one-month trial.
If you’re keen to learn more about how to use SEO and optimize your blog articles, check out my SEO training course. Here, I will teach you exactly how to create SEO blog posts to drive thousands of pageviews from Google!
2. Optimizing For Mobile Devices
If you look around when you’re out in a restaurant, you’ll no doubt see people on their mobile phones.
People are using their mobile phones way more than their desktop computers. Therefore, making sure that your website and its content are optimized for mobile devices is essential.
If you haven’t paid attention to this on your site, it could mean that when a user comes to your site while on their mobile phone, they won’t be able to see your content correctly.
If the design of your site is considered poor in terms of the user experience, this won’t help you rank well on search engines.
3. Optimizing The Meta Description
What’s a meta description, you may ask? This short sentence shows up under your site name when someone sees search results.
Remember the times when you read the blurb, and it makes no sense, so you skip to the one that does? This is why optimizing the meta description is essential if you’re writing blogs for SEO.
Although meta descriptions don’t help search rankings, they can drive clicks, traffic, and conversions, translating to potential revenue.
To write a good meta description, follow these tips:
- Keep meta descriptions to within 140 to 160 characters.
- Check what your competitors are doing to ensure your description will beat theirs.
- Target a specific search intent. Try to write meta descriptions that call to your audience. Keeping things generic like “poach an egg” won’t be enough to get someone to click. “Learn more about how to poach the perfect egg” is more specific and calls to the reader’s intent.
4. Including Image Alt Text
Alt-text is text in the HTML code of your content that describes the appearance and function of an image on the page. It creates a better user experience. If your images don’t load properly, your reader will still be able to understand what your image is displaying.
How does blogging help with SEO and alt text, you may ask? Having alt text on your images means the search engine crawlers will be able to index your page properly, helping with your search ranking.
Adding alt-text to your images will come down to the content management system (CMS) you use. Most have an image alt-text field. There are ways to add alt-text directly into the HTML code if you don’t.
When writing your alt-text, make sure that it includes just enough description of the image without the extra fluff. This isn’t like a meta description where you want to capture the reader’s attention. Most users won’t even see the alt-text – so keep it brief and descriptive.
5. Limiting Topic Tags
Topic tags can help organize the content on your blog, and you may think that adding as many as possible will help writing blogs for SEO. However, it does the opposite.
Too many similar tags may make the search engine crawler think you have duplicate content on your site. For example, topic tags like “health,” “healthy,” and “health and wellness” are too similar to one another to be used on the same post.
When you’re thinking about how does blogging help with SEO with topic tags, take some time to clean them up to make sure your content is SEO optimized.
To do this, choose about 15–25 topic tags that you think are important to your blog and aren’t too similar to one another. Then only tag your posts with those keywords.
6. Using User-Friendly URLs
You may think that URLs don’t matter when it comes to how blogging helps with SEO, but they do.
The URL structure should make sense so that your users can navigate across your site. Anything too long and complicated will confuse users and affect the user experience.
Search engines prefer ranking website URLs that make it easier for them and users to understand the content on the page.
For example, if your “About Us” page’s URL is www.myblog/moreinformation/thingsaboutme – this isn’t necessarily telling the reader what the page is about.
Also, if they wanted to jump from your “About Us” page to your services page, it’s unclear what the URL would be.
One thing to note with URLs is that you shouldn’t change them after a page has been published. This will affect your SEO efforts, especially if the page has been live for a while.
The best thing to do is to change the title of the page. If you’re only just starting to write content, this is the time to make sure your URLs are fit for purpose.
7. Including Related Posts
Linking to existing content on your site helps show search engines that your content is valid and can be linked to. This is also a way to help boost the views on your site, which will help grow the validity of your content.
Ensure that the links you’re linking to are related to the article you have written. For example, if you’ve written a fitness article, don’t link to a finance article on your site. Sure it’s on your site, but they need to be related.
If you haven’t written enough content to link to, you can always go back and add links to related posts after you build more of a content base.
8. Reviewing Metrics
To understand how does blogging help SEO, it’s essential to review the metrics. Use Google’s Search Console (free) to help you understand how your content ranks in search.
It also enables you to determine which keywords get people to your content. If you’re not getting much traffic, reviewing these keywords and adding them to your content will help.
Ranking in search won’t happen overnight, so reviewing your metrics every 6-12 months will help you understand how your site is tracking in the long term.
9. Organizing By Topic Clusters
It can be tempting to only focus your SEO blog topics to rank in search. However, this can create an unorganized and complicated site structure. It’ll be challenging to understand how your site content is structured and how to find content on your site.
To help with SEO, organizing your topics under a handful of overarching pillar topics will help you manage your content properly. This allows the search engine to understand what your site is about and how to send readers to your site.
10. Publishing Evergreen Content
When planning and writing content for your blog, make sure that it’s evergreen. This means that in 5 years, your content will still be relevant. The way to do this is to steer clear of dates or time-specific events.
For example, if you’re writing content about how to work from home during a pandemic. Remove the reference to pandemic – the content you write about working from home should apply regardless of time.
Having evergreen content helps your site rank over time and contributes to a steady stream of leads. Remember, ranking on the first page of Google doesn’t happen overnight. It’s about the long game here.
11. Updating Existing Content
If you’ve already written content for your site and want to optimize it for SEO, go back and update your existing content. The best blog structure for SEO uses keywords, so if your existing content doesn’t have the right keywords, go through and add these in.
To learn how to update your existing content to boost the organic traffic from Google to your site, check out my step-by-step plan for updating your content.
12. Aiming For Featured Content
Featured content (or featured snippets) is in the top spot of search rankings. Understanding how to optimize your blog structure for SEO includes aiming for featured content.
Featured content is the best way to get clicks from organic search results without ranking #1. It’s better than the number one spot because it appears above it, meaning more views.
Featured content gives the reader the answer they’re looking for without having to click on the site and find the answer on the page. There are four types of featured content on Google, and depending on your site, you can aim for each type.
1. Description box: this is where the content describes or answers a question.
2. The table: this is where the results are displayed in a table – for example, if you search “what is half a cup of flour in grams,” the answer will come up as a conversion table.
3. The ordered list: this is where the question you have results in a list of ordered steps.
4. The unordered list: this is where the question results in answers that aren’t ordered. For example, when you ask, “what’s the best keyword search tool.”
13. Sharing On Social Media
Finally, the best way to help the SEO of your blog is to share your content through your social media channels. Social media drives traffic towards your SEO-optimized content.
While it doesn’t directly impact your search ranking, it does help. It helps by building trust, customer loyalty, and drives brand awareness and exposure – which, in the long run, enables you to boost your visibility online and the traffic to your site.
How Exactly Does Blogging Help With SEO?
Well do blogs help SEO? When you understand what is blog optimization, it all comes down to positioning your website as a relevant answer to your customer’s questions.
Your blogging and the content you publish give you different opportunities for search engines to rank your content, driving traffic and making your site more appealing to visitors.
So there you have it. We’ve broken it down and helped you understand how does blogging help with SEO. You now have the 13 ways to help you optimize your content for SEO, and all it takes is taking action so you can get that coveted featured content spot.
Once you’ve implemented these 13 ways, you’ll start seeing your content rank on Google and see the traffic on your site increase.
Remember, this doesn’t happen overnight, so making sure that you’re consistently looking for new keywords, tagging and updating your content effectively, sharing on social media, and reviewing your metrics regularly will pay off in the long run.
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