There’s a saying, “Content is king.” There’s also an old saying, “Behind every great man stands a great woman.” So, if content is king, search engine optimization (SEO) is definitely queen. Companies know that having a blog attached to their website is very important when it comes to driving traffic and converting leads. Great content on a blog can also define placement as an industry leader. However, no matter how great the content, if no one is finding your blog then what’s the point, right? You need the traffic to bring in readers, to turn those readers into leads, and to turn those leads into buyers. Without SEO supporting your blog’s content, you’d be missing out on thousands or millions of dollars just because you weren’t easily found in a simple web search. In order to not be overlooked and to increase your search engine ranking, here are a few components of search engine optimization that you must include when writing great content for your blog.
THE COMPONENTS OF SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
Keywords
Keywords are the foundation of SEO. They’re what people type into their search engines when they want to find information. You need to be able to understand which keywords people will use when looking for your type of business. When writing blog posts make sure to research which keywords you should use and only choose relevant and effective keywords for your post. If you’re not sure where to start with your keyword research, there are plenty of free SEO keyword research tools available online. Make sure to use the keywords in the title, url, image alt text, body, and headers of your posts.
Social Media
All SEO doesn’t start on your blog. If you write a great post, why not share it on your social media platforms? Social media sharing is the backbone of a great blog post because it allows you to include backlinks to your blog, images, and even receive immediate interaction from potential leads.
Link Building
Search engines determine the ranking of websites through how popular they believe the sites to be. The more links a site has coming in, the more popular the engines believe it to be. That’s not to say that every link into a site is a legit link. In fact, if there are links from spammy or untrustworthy sites then it may hurt your sites ranking. In order to help your ranking there are several ways to build links to increase your sites popularity. The easiest way to search engine optimization is to link to your own content. If you have a blog posts talking about content management and you mention content management in another posts, you should link to it. Internal links count just as much as external links. For external linking you can guest post on other websites, be interviewed by somebody, have your company mentioned in an online newspaper, submit your site to online directories all with links back to your website.
Meta Data
When your website does show up in search results, you want your post’s title and description to be as relevant as possible to the searched keyword. You can name your post something entirely different in your meta title from what’s on your blog. You can also tailor your meta description and add relevant keywords. Be as descriptive as possible because you only have a few characters to use that will show up in your description.
Images
People are performing web searches, but they’re not only reading the descriptions from their searches. They’re viewing images attached to the content from searches. Include images with your blog posts. With those images, make sure that you’re adding alt text. Adding alt text will allow you to choose the description of the image. This is important with certain platforms, such as Pinterest. If you pin your blog’s image, the description you add will be available on the pin. Adding your post’s title and your company’s name will help your search engine optimization.