We’ve told you before how your website’s blog should be a key part of your digital marketing strategy.
It can help position you as a brand leader in your field, and can help to develop better customer relationships. Just as importantly, it can help your website’s SEO.
The best chances of it doing so are if your posts are written according to best SEO practice, so here’s a checklist of tactics for blog posts:
1 – Post Regularly
Posting regularly ensures that Google keeps coming back to your site. It sees what’s new, and has a good look around the other content again too. This increases the chances of it showing that content to others.
Aim to publish roughly once per week. Not sure you’ll have the time to write something so often? As a leading SEO company serving Dublin, Ireland, and the UK, we offer a blog-writing service as part of digital marketing packages. Just contact us to get us working for you.
2 – Write the right amount!
A blog post of just 100 words won’t get you far. A blog post of 3,000 words is too much. For most website designs, an average length of 500 words is enough. That gives Google and other search engines sufficient text to crawl, and enough keywords and content to analyse, to determine what it should rank for – and where.
It will also hold the reader’s interest, if you’ve written the piece well enough. Head for 1,000 words, and they’ll start to drift away.
Remember, there are some things that no-one has ever said:
- ‘I’m so happy that tomorrow’s Monday!’
- ‘Yes, your bum DOES look big in that…..’
- ‘Oh, I wish there was more text on this website page……’
Remember that last one! Don’t overdo it in terms of length.
3 – Use images and other media correctly
You’ve often heard it said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, that’s not true here.
Instead, a keyword is worth a thousand pictures, if you don’t tell Google what the pictures are of. Even an infographic with all the detail you could ever need on a subject is still just an anonymous picture to Google, if you’ve just called it ‘infographic.jpg’ or similar.
Give your images relevant filenames and alt-text. We do so religiously when posting blogs for a client who’s on one of our tailor-made SEO packages. We recommend you do the same, if you look after your own blogging. Otherwise, contact us to see what we can do for you too.
4 – Use long-tail keywords
Longer keyword phrases might not get as much search traffic as shorter ones, but they’re almost always more relevant to the searcher and much easier to rank for.
Longer keyword phrases are often used by prospects who are looking for deeper, more specific information about a topic. This makes them ideal for blog posts.
We find relevant keywords for all topics through our diligent online market research. Take the time to learn to do the same, or contact us if you want outside help.
5 – But don’t stuff it with keywords!
Old habits and old ideas sometimes die hard. Yes, there was a time when you could manipulate Google results with ‘keyword stuffing’. Say you were an SEO company in Dublin. You could have written something like this:
‘If you’re looking for the best SEO company in Dublin, then call us, because we’re the top SEO company in Dublin. We know we’re the best SEO company in Dublin because we get the best SEO results. Our clients all know we’re the best SEO company in Dublin too. Call us!’ ***
Today, 500 words of that won’t get you very far. Google will know that nobody wants to read that type of stuff, and so won’t rank it very highly at all. Anyway, if you really are the best SEO company in Dublin, your record will speak for itself. You won’t have to shout it in every sentence.
6 – Pay attention to your URL and meta description
So, your text and pictures are perfect, and you put them on your website. But you’re still not finished. You need to pay attention to the post’s URL and meta description too.
The URL should have your keyword(s) in it. The meta description should too. Remember, the meta description is what the searcher will see on the Search Engine Results Page, so more than any other, it’s the thing that makes him or her decide whether to actually click on it. Your keyword(s) and a compelling reason to visit the page are vital.
Finally – Put it all together!
There’s much more to successfully writing SEO-friendly blogs too, but put these six tips together, and you’ll be on the right track.
Good luck if you’re going to maintain your blog yourself. Or, if you’d like engage us as a top SEO company to do it for you, just contact us to talk.
Regular blog posts and/or news items are a staple feature of all our SEO packages for Dublin, rest of Ireland, and the UK. Our packages include much more too, and we tailor-make them for each client, to suit their needs perfectly.
Get in touch with us any time to learn more.
‘Best SEO Company in Dublin’
*** See what we did there? Obviously, we’d like to rank for the term ‘best SEO company in Dublin’. Equally obviously, we wouldn’t keyword stuff an entire blog post with that. But by working in a few mentions where it made sense to do so (even if giving an example of what was ‘wrong’!), we’ve now got some SEO ‘juice’ for the term here.
That’s an example of the sort of tactics that can work for you too, if you hire a professional SEO company.
P.S. – Did we mention that we’re the best SEO company in Dublin??!!
