What is Blog SEO, and how to do it yourself?

If you’re a blogger, you may wonder what blog SEO is. Maybe you’ve heard the term blog SEO, but you’re not sure what it means or, more importantly, why it matters to your blog.

What is Blog SEO anyway?

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

SEO is 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 which is 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. 

What’s the first step for blog SEO?

I teach my students and clients to use SEO to craft their 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.

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 for blog 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 use your keyword. There are specific rules about writing these. You can learn about Title Tags here and Meta Descriptions here.

You’ll also want to upload an image or two to your blog post. The recommendation is one image for every 500 words. And make sure you optimize the image file name; learn how here before uploading it to your blog.

Get a copy of my free SEO Content Quick Start Guide now; it has all of the best practices for blog SEO in one place & includes a handy SEO checklist to verify you’ve done everything you need before you hit publish.

Final thoughts on blog SEO

If you want your blog posts to drive leads for your business, you need to use SEO to help craft the content strategy for your blog. 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 then finally, make sure you optimize your content for Google so it gets shown to more people.