Does Blogging Help SEO? Blog SEO Tips

Do you want to get more visitors to your website? If yes, then the most important thing you need to consider when you are targeting more audience reach and increased visitors is taking care of the SEO.

Why SEO?

Well, what do you do when you have a question? Probably you will take out your mobile or laptop and Google it, right?

When your website is search engine optimized, your website ranking improves, and it rakes up your chances of fetching that visitor on your website. However, the way search engines work, it is not that easy as it looks to get your website rank.

One of the most prominent parameters on which the search engines work is the content. If you have valuable content on your website, then you will have a better chance at ranking. Moreover, the best way to keep pushing content on any website is by creating a blog.

 

If you have a blog, then you are halfway done with your SEO campaign. Although, merely having a blog page is not the key here.

 

You need to have a regularly updated blog with fresh content to make it rank on search engines. If you have a blog page but very less or not content being actively added to it, then you will not be able to reap the full benefits of the blog.

Here in this article, we will first look at why Blogging is essential for SEO purposes and later we will discuss how you can use your blog to optimize your blog for search engines.

Let’s first address the question, “Does Blogging help SEO”?

In one word, Yes.

Blogging is one of the most practiced SEO technique. There is no debate in this, but people always confuse SEO with coding and other technical practices like link building, etc. but it is not what SEO is.

You can drastically improve your SEO performance if you maintain your blog. I can give you dozens of reasons on how your business can benefit from having a blog but instead of jamming down all the points. Let’s discuss each point in detail.

Keeps your website fresh and updated with content

When your website has a blog and is actively updated at the same time, you will get more opportunities to get your website on the radar of search engines.

If we do look at the search engines and consider our users, you will understand the importance of content. Let me ask you this…

When was the last time you went to a website and realized that the website had not been updated with any content? I am sure, at that point, you would have questioned the genuineness of the business. The company behind the product could have gone out of business entirely, or the website can be providing the information that has ultimately been out of date and needs further revisions.

Google wants to deliver the most updated information to its readers, and the algorithm is crafted in such a way that the search engines will pull only content that is fresh and updated. In this case, managing a blog is a perfect and effective solution.

You might not update your website’s landing page or the home page that often but having a blog will give you an option to feed in more data for Google to index and work with. You can fetch more users as well when you get a better ranking on your website because of fresh new content being published on your website.

Keeps people on your website

When you blog about something, you make sure that there are no stones left unturned when it comes to that specific topic, and that is what makes your blog worth reading.

If you have a blog with no value to the users, it will make them go away, and that will affect your Bounce rate.

How? Well, if someone Googles something and goes to the first result they see and didn’t find anything useful there, then this will tell the search engine that your content is not useful to the user and will shoot down your ranking on Google.

Although Google has never admitted that the dwell time or merely the time a user spends on a website is a deciding factor, they have indirectly hinted on this topic in a couple of their statements that made it clear that dwell time is one of the factors when it comes to SEO.

Not having a blog will give not much value to the user as all you will have to offer to your user is the details of your product or the company. It is very likely that the user will get bored and will jump back as the only thing “valuable” they will find on your website is the details of your product.

If someone visits your website’s blog and stays, there for a longer duration will tell Google that the website actually has useful content and that will give a positive score to your website regarding SEO.

Also, if you want your blog readers to stay longer, they will need more content to read. So you need to make sure that your blog has good length but make sure you do not become too wordy and end up writing unnecessary parts that are just redundant.

This is one of the most common problems bloggers face. Even looking at the length of posts ranking on the average first-page results on Google, the length is always near to 2000 words.

Internal linking benefits

A good part of SEO campaign should be about linking your pages internally, and since you will be blogging and creating content yourself, you will be able to connect your website internally in a much better way.

This is an honest mistake most marketers and bloggers make when creating content. Although you can link almost everything to your landing page or the home page, that only counts to one way of connectivity. With your blog, you can connect to almost every page by writing relevant content.

You can always use your content to link your content internally strategically. You can use the anchor tag efficiently to tell Google and other search engines what kind of pages you link to and what the page is about. This will help you in strengthening your target keyword and making your blog suitable to your target keyword as well.

Also, when you interlink your content especially on your blog, you also tell your users more about the subject and manage to make them stay on your website longer and thus improving your bounce rate.

Earning external links

Another big part of SEO is gaining backlinks from another website. This is a really difficult task as not many websites give outbound links pointing to other websites.

If you want to build your authority and gain good ranking regarding SEO, you will definitely need other sites (and those too important ones) have to link back to your website. It is not ‘impossible’ to gain backlinks to your website without a blog, but it will make your task difficult.

Source: Neilpatel.com

If you blog on your website and keep pushing excellent and valuable content, you can leave the worry of gaining backlinks. When people find the contents of a website helpful, they are much more likely to add the links to the website in their content (on their website) as a reference. This automatically gives you a backlink to your website and tells Google that the content on the website has good authority and is trustworthy.

This has been studied and worked upon by Hubspot. They did a study on some companies without a blog page and ones with a blog page. It showed that the companies with the blog earn 97% more inbound links. It also makes sense that websites will link to content that is helpful and can be used to explain something further.

Helps you make a connection with your audience

This is not directly linked to SEO, but if you look at it in detail, it totally adds up. When you blog on your website, you give your users some data to interact with. If you are regularly putting on great content that is relative and useful to the users, you will find more visitors to your website.

Having more visitors on your website and that too having returning visitors that are coming back to read more on that content, you will see a good improvement in your SEO. This happens because when users find your content useful, they visit again and this tells Google and other search engines that you are uploading useful and good content and thus Google raises your authority in that domain.

Meanwhile, it is good for your SEO; it adds up to your authority of the website as well. When you start building authority on your website, people will more trust with your brand and will start signing up to your newsletters, bookmarking your website, commenting and connecting with you on other platforms, and that is what you want, and it is way better than getting that #1 spot on Google. Isn’t that the whole reason why you started?

Targeted visitors through keyword targeting

When you post on your company’s or brand’s blog, you get the freedom to fetch the users around your niche using the power of keywords.

For example, if you are selling guitars online, you can blog about “Best guitars for beginners”, or “most trusted brand when it comes to guitars” etc. In addition to all this, you can blog about something like “best guitars for backpackers” so you can fetch in travelers on your website who like to play guitars as well. This is what keyword targeting is all about.

You can leverage the power of keywords and can redirect the traffic you want on your website who can be your potential buyers.

Regarding SEO, when you have more blogs on your website talking around the niche of your product, you will be able to fetch more readers. Also, with more keywords, you will find it relatively easy to mark your spot on Google and the search engines will easily understand the topic or niche of your website.

Social Signals

When a blog is published on the website, it will be shared across social media platform to grab more visitors and have more conversions. For every activity you make of your own content on the social platforms, Google sees it as a positive signal. Every share, like, comment it gets, Google adds it up to the SEO score of the website as essentially it is telling that the content is valuable.

When you have more content to share on social platforms, you give more positive notes to Google and fetch a good search engine ranking.

Long-tail keyword targeting

Many businesses start their SEO campaign by targeting the most relevant keyword to their business. For example, if you are selling custom-made T-shirts online, your main target would be “Custom-made T-shirts” as you would want your website to pop up on the search engines when searched for that specific keyword.

The sad truth is ranking for that specific keyword is really difficult unless you have a wild SEO game and you are the most popular Custom T-shirt company in the country. SEO can be really competitive and for you to breach in this ruthless competition is to target more specific keywords which can be longer as well.

Another thing why long-tail keywords are in rising is that with the advancement of technology, people are shifting to easier search techniques and one of those is voice search by Google. It has been observed that people who search with their voice typing, feed in more specific and longer search queries and that is resulting in many search queries being left with fewer results.

You can use keyword prediction tools for your search engines to predict what your keyword optimized search query should be.

Of course, you cannot have all the keywords stuffed in your landing page as it will simply make it look awkward, but you can use the blogs of your website to target more specific keywords that can be longer in length so you can get the target audience you need.

A store selling custom-made T-shirts can write about “Why to get your own custom made company T-shirts” or “How to design your own T-shirt and get it printed.”

This search keyword will not attract as much traffic as “custom-made T-shirts” but they will be covered in your targeted audience as getting a couple of pages like this on the first page will get you more traffic than having a blog targeting “custom-made T-shirts” on the fourth or fifth page.

Well, this was all about how Blogging can help you in improving your SEO score. I am sure you can understand the importance of the same now and would be ready to launch the first post, but before we do that, we need to understand how you can start your blog and start publishing while keeping all the SEO factors in mind.

How to Write SEO Friendly posts?

In this section, we will talk about how you can improve your blog’s SEO score and increase your chances of ranking higher in search engines results pages. This will cover both the aspects on how to write posts that appeal to both readers and search engines.

Include at least 1-2 Keywords

Before including your keywords in your website’s post, you need to select your target keywords. You can use tools available on the internet to select the keywords that will work the best with you. You can try searching the keywords and can see what kind of content is coming up and how you can add relevant content to the targeted keywords.

Now, since you have your keywords ready, you need to consider where you need to add these keywords. Typically there are 4 essential places where you should try including your keywords: Title tag, headers & Body, URL and meta description.

Title Tag

Title Tag or more commonly known as the Headline of your post will be the first thing a search engine will see, or a reader will lay their eyes on so that makes the title a very vital part of your blog.

To make your Title keyword friendly, make sure that you add the keyword within the first 60 characters of your title because it is just where Google cuts off headlines and add the “…”

If you have a lengthy title, it is considered a good idea to add your keywords in the beginning since they might get cut off in the search engine reports pages or SERPs.

While you are adding the keywords in the title, do not forget to make your title engaging as well. If you stuff your Headline with too many keywords, it will look awkward, and the user might not even click on the title. Which is something why we are working so hard to rank our post?

Make sure your title in attractive enough to fetch the attention of the readers and compelling enough to make them visit the link.

Headers and Body

For the body, you should maintain a good keyword density, and you can pitch in your keywords here and there, but at the end, you need to focus on not stuffing the post with irrelevant keywords or leaving good opportunities where you could have added a keyword.

Learn by observing. Observe how other blogs are doing it when it comes to filling the content with keywords. Do make your blog or article look natural and reader-friendly.

While keywords are important, your primary focus while writing content should always be what matters to your audience and not how many times you can include the keywords in your article. Focus on answering all the questions that your customer might have in mind while arriving at your post. If you keep your focus in line, you will see that most of your keywords will find a place for them automatically.

URL Structure

When search engines look or “crawl” a website, URL is the first thing they see. The URL being your unique address to that particular blog post, you can add the necessary keywords there easily.

Usually, in WordPress, the URL automatically fetches the title as the URL but you can edit it and can add the keywords there easily by clicking on the edit button.

Meta Description

One of the easiest ways to manage the Meta description is by the Yoast SEO plugin (free). IT makes the task of adding a meta description relatively easy.

The meta description is the text that appears on your search results below the title. These descriptions give the users the search information they need to determine whether to visit the link or not.

The maximum length for a meta description is about 300 words. You can use this length to give search engines your own custom metatext. If there is no meta text provided, the search engines will pull in the blog contents automatically, which might not even make sense at the beginning.

Add quality metadata with keywords in it. You can stuff in long-tail keywords as well as they will make much more sense in this section.

Link your content Internally

Linking your content internally is very crucial when it comes to SEO. One of the reasons internal linking is done is to retain the users on your website for a longer duration. When a user stays for longer on your website, your website’s bounce rate decreases and the performance of the webpage in terms of SEO improves.

Also, other than retaining your users, Google also sees the internal linking as a sign that your content is well connected and related to one another. This adds to your ranking as well.

You should make sure that the page you are linking to is contextual and the text you are linking it with makes total sense. For example, if you link the text “website designing” with a link to a page that has content about, let’s say, “how to start a blog.” It will not make any sense to the user, and neither user nor search engines will appreciate this.

Another thing that not many marketers talk about is linking with relevant text. When you link your content to your other parts of your text, you should consider changing the text to something that is related to the link. For example, instead on “Click here” or “Learn more,” add a link that has keywords related to the targeted link.

Make your Blog Mobile Friendly

In today’s generation, people are using their cell phones and smartphones to search more than traditional computers or even laptops. Since all these searches are being done on the mobile, Google shows custom displays of listing in a mobile-friendly format.

Also, Google also checks if the content that is being listed is mobile friendly or not. If your website does not have a “responsive version” ready that can be displayed on mobiles and tablets, your search engine ranking can be easily affected. This came into force since Google’s Mobilegeddon algorithm can into force in 2015.

So, the question still remains. How do you create mobile responsive websites? Well, the easiest way to do it is by using a “responsive web design”. The responsive designs have a single page optimized to work for both mobiles and desktop devices.

If you are using WordPress, the easiest way to create a responsive blog design and that too as per your requirements is by going with the Blog Designer plugin. With this plugin, you can create a layout for your blog without touching a single line of code. This will help you to keep your focus on design while the plugin will take care of the SEO part. The plugin has loads of blog templates and you can select the one you want and can change the layout as per your wish easily from the settings. The plugin is free to download, and if you want to extend your customization power, then you can try out the premium version of the plugin.

Creating Blog Clusters

Earlier bloggers and marketers used to target and write on the most searched topic and expected it to rank on Google. Well, this used to provide a good amount of information, but there was a flaw to this. When bloggers wrote on multiple topics and not on the topics that are not related to each other, it gave mixed signals to search engines and many times bloggers used to find their own articles competing against each other on same search engine reports pages.

Now, to make your pages rank on search engines and to answer all the queries that people have, the best way to create blog clusters.  In a cluster, you choose a broader topic and then start creating content around the topic which will be closely related to one another.

This way you will get a better opportunity in linking your content internally as well as your readers will have more things to look at.

Optimize your Image’s Alt text.

If you are writing a blog post, one of the most common ways to make it engaging and worth reader’s time is by adding images that help in explaining your content and assists in creating a visual image in user’s mind.

Since search engines use crawlers and these crawlers cannot “see” the image you are adding to your website, so the Alt text is the one that helps the search engines to understand the image you are adding to your website. This way, you can rank your posts on Google images results as well.

Alt text also adds up to your better user experience as when the image is not able to be displayed; it shows the text instead.

Although it is not recognized as an important SEO tip, it is always worth your 30 seconds of input. You do not want your image to have text such as “IMG054956” and rather want to display something contextual such as “cat-sleeping.”

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With these 5 golden tips, you will be able to work out your SEO and that too without going into many technicalities. Remember, SEO is an ongoing process, so you need to keep the focus on your SEO throughout the process, and you should not forget about it once you hit the publish button.

SEO can be tricky, but if you follow the right path, you can find your way around it pretty easily. You need to focus on the points I have mentioned above such as keyword optimization, internal linking, and external linking and you will be able to get a better search engine ranking on your website’s posts.

There are other SEO tips as well which you can use, but you will require to give extra time just for the SEO part and these tips you can implement while writing your blog quickly. Once you start publishing your content, you will see the changes in Search engine results yourself in no time.

If you found this piece of information useful, do share it with others and if you have any queries, do leave a comment down below.

Which Blogging SEO tactic you find the most useful? Let us know by commenting it down below!