How to optimize blog posts for SEO

If you’re a blogger, you may have heard about blog SEO and that it's important to get traffic to your website. But do you find yourself wondering how to optimize blog posts for SEO? What exactly are you supposed to do? Let's talk about it because blog SEO is probably a lot simpler and easier than you think. It's not going to take you a lot more time, and if you do it right, you'll be able to get a lot more traffic to your blog. 

What is Blog SEO anyway?

Blog SEO is SEO just done on a blog. Okay, that’s super helpful, thanks. ;)

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Bloggers and website owners need to do SEO work on each website page or blog post they create so that Google can understand what it’s about and know who to show it to.

It’s our way of helping Google better understand our content (website page, video, or blog post). When Google understands our content better, it’s easier for them to know who to show it to.

SEO drives targeted, relevant traffic to your blog. It's the know in your like, know, and trust factors that are critical to your blog's success. 

Listen to the podcast here.

Why do blogs need SEO?

SEO drives traffic to your blog. 

When you write a blog post, if you don’t do the SEO work, you won’t get as much traffic as you would if you did SEO. It’s simply the final step between your writing and your publication. 

A blog without SEO might as well not exist because Google doesn't understand the post as well as they could and because of that, they're less likely to show it to potential readers. Using SEO is the key to getting your blog found and getting organic traffic to your website. 

How do you optimize blog posts for SEO?

I teach my students and clients to use SEO to craft the content strategy for their websites or blogs. That means we brainstorm topic ideas and do keyword research BEFORE writing our blog posts or creating our website pages so that we know we’re writing on a subject that people are interested in and searching Google for. When we create content we know people are looking for; it’s more likely to get traffic because we know there's an audience interested in the topic.

We don't want to invest time and energy into writing blog posts on topics no one cares about. We want to be sure our content will be seen and help our potential readers. 

Once you’ve chosen the best keyword for our blog post, you write your blog post. Use your keyword in the post, but don’t focus on how many times you use the keyword. Focus on providing value for your reader. When you write on a topic that includes your keyword, you naturally use it in the copy. Once you’ve finished your first draft of your blog post, you can go back through and re-read it to see if you’ve used your keyword enough times or maybe even too many. You’ll know if you can add it anywhere or if you’ve used it too many times and now it sounds weird when you read it to yourself.

I teach you exactly how to do this in Simple SEO Content. Register today if you're ready to learn how to use SEO and Content Marketing together to grow your blog's traffic. 

What else do you do to optimize blog posts for SEO?

Once you’ve written a great blog post that answers your Ideal Customer’s questions and provides them value, you need to optimize it for Google before publishing. This means you need to write a Title Tag and a Meta Description that uses your keyword. There are specific rules about writing these. You can learn about Title Tags here and Meta Descriptions here. Follow Google's rules and write ones that meet best practices. Your title tag and meta descriptions are written for the potential reader; they're the first thing they see in the search results, but they're also SEO elements that help Google understand what your blog post is about. They're part of the blog post optimization. 

You’ll also want to upload an image or two to your blog post. The recommendation is one image for every 350-500 words. And make sure you optimize the image file name; learn how here before uploading it to your blog. Your image file name is part of our optimization on blog posts to help Google understand what the post is about. Your readers won't see the image file names, but Google will. You want to use your SEO keywords in your file name. Read the blog post on how to name images for SEO that's linked in this paragraph to learn how to do this.

Get a copy of my free Beginner's Guide to SEO. It has all of the best practices for blog SEO in one place and includes a handy SEO checklist to verify that you’ve done everything you need before you hit publish.

Final thoughts on optimizing blog posts for SEO

If you want your blog posts to drive leads for your business, you need to use SEO to help craft your content strategy. Choose topics that have keywords your website or blog can rank for, write your content for your Ideal Customer and provide value to them, and finally, make sure you optimize your blog posts for SEO so they get found on Google. Your blog content can be the biggest free traffic driver for your website if you create content that people are interested in, target keywords you can rank for, and optimize for SEO.