What Are SEO Keywords
What Is Blog SEO?
Blog SEO is the practice of optimizing a blog’s content, site architecture and HTML code for search engines. Common tasks associated with blog SEO include on-page optimization, installing plugins, improving page loading speed and internal linking.
Why Is Blog SEO Important?
Search engines are best traffic source for blogs.
In fact, a recent survey found that SEO was 3rd most important source of traffic (just behind email marketing).
Our own blog is living proof of the power of SEO. Sure, we get a fair amount of traffic from Twitter, LinkedIn, email and direct traffic. And added together, these sources make up the majority of our monthly traffic.
But Google sends us over 396,000 visitors per month.
Without blog SEO, our site’s growth would have been much slower.
And if you want to learn how to optimize your blog for SEO, check out these tested SEO tips.
Best Practices
Find One Main Keyword For Each Post
If you optimize your post around lots of different keywords, Google and other search engines get confused. They don’t know what your content is actually about.
But when you focus on a single keyword, Google can easily understand that your post is about that one topic.
If your blog is new, I recommend focusing on long tail keywords at first. That’s because long tail terms aren’t super competitive.
To find long tail keywords, type a term into Google search…
…and check out the keywords that Google suggests underneath the search bar.
You can also use a nice little free tool called Answer The Public.
This tool generates a list of question-based keywords that you can optimize your post around.
(Besides keyword research, this tool is great for coming up with content topic ideas.)
Optimize Your Blog Post
There’s no need to stuff your keyword a million times on your page. That’s called “keyword stuffing”. Keyword stuffing used to work back in the day. But it can do more harm and good today.
Instead, you want to include your keyword in a few key places on your page.
Title And Title Tag
Most CMSs (like WordPress) have a title field at the top of the post.
And you want to include your keyword in your blog post title and your page’s title tag.
For example, on this page from our site, we include our target keyword “SEO keywords” in the post title.
And we use that same exact keyword in our title tag
That’s because Google puts extra weight on terms that show up in your page’s title tag.
Certain WordPress themes and plugins automatically make your post your title tag. But others don’t. So you want to double-check your page’s HTML to make sure that your keyword ends up in your title.
Intro and Conclusion Sections
In my experience, placing your keyword in these two key areas helps a little bit with on-page SEO.
H1, H2 And H3 Subheadings
Use your keyword in an H1, H2 or H3 subheading.
Most WordPress themes automatically make your post title an H1.
Besides an H1, add at least one subheading to your post that contains a keyword.
For example, I added my keyword in this H2 subheading:
These tips are the most important SEO best practices to keep in mind as you optimize your blog content.
But they only scratch the surface. When it comes to on-page SEO, you can also optimize your page’s alt text, site speed, responsive design, mobile optimization, and more.
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