SEO for Beginners: How to Optimize Your Blog Posts for SEO
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is an effective tool for achieving several important marketing objectives such as branding, getting a better ranking on Google, and generating organic traffic to your site. This has made SEO a universally beneficial marketing tactic for various organizations, whatever their objectives.
It can be unclear when you’re new to search engine optimization, have just launched your blog, or don’t know where to look. SEO used to be the domain of specialists; it has now become an everyday marketing activity.
SEO or search engine optimization is an effective tool for achieving several important marketing objectives such as branding, getting a better ranking in Google searches, generating organic traffic to your site, and making it a universally beneficial marketing tactic for various organizations, whatever their goals.
The objective of SEO is to generate traffic to your site, branding, and marketing, improve unpaid results, and get a better ranking in Google searches. Here’s what SEO does for your blog posts. And it can be not very clear when you’re new to SEO, just starting your blog, or don’t know where to look. SEO used to be the domain of specialists; now, it has become an everyday marketing activity.
Even if you are not a beginner, you must be careful when doing SEO for your site. Given that Google makes hundreds of changes to its search algorithm every year, it’s not surprising that it can sometimes be confusing.
So techniques that used to be a waste of time are now indispensable, or procedures that worked before you will now be penalized.
Therefore, being aware of a significant update allows you to avoid wasting energy and resources by implementing unnecessary tactics that have no results. Or even worse, by implementing harmful techniques that will be penalized.
This article aims to overview what SEO is, its importance, and how Google works and guides you in your efforts. With this beginner’s guide to SEO, we will see how to optimize your blog posts for SEO and get them ranked higher in Google searches!
Definition of SEO
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is “the process of improving the quality and quantity of a website’s traffic by increasing the visibility of a website or web page for users of a web search engine.”
In other words, SEO is a set of techniques to persuade search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo, to recommend your content to their users as the best solution to their problem.
Why Is SEO Important?
Search engine optimization brings you visitors or organic traffic. Most search engine users are likelier to click on suggestions in the first Search Engine Results Page or SERPS.
In other words, your website must appear in one of the first positions to gain visitors to your website or customers to your online store.
-In addition, the traffic you gain from a good SEO practice is “free” because you don’t pay Google for this ranking or when the user clicks on the result and visits your site.
So on the same results page, there are often paid results; the “Ad” icon can identify them. When a user clicks on a paid result and visits the site, the advertiser pays the search engine for that visit.
The great advantage of SEO traffic is that if you have a website, blog, or online store, SEO can help you get free targeted traffic from search engines.
SEO can give you a head start on your competitors. If your website is better optimized for search engines, you will likely have more customers and make more sales.
– Good SEO practices also improve your site’s user experience and usability. Users trust search engines and being in the top positions for the keywords that the user is looking for increases the trust of your site.
-Normally, people who find your website by searching on Google or other search engines like yahoo are more likely to promote it on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
How Does Google Work?
Google organizes the content of the web so that it can provide its users with the best answer to their questions or the best solution to their problems.
You can consider Google a reference system for all information on the web. It keeps references to each page and the information it contains. When you ask for specific information, Google can direct you to the content that provides the best answer or solution.
Google strives to recommend the most relevant answer, from the most reliable source, in the most appropriate format for its user. Taking into account two principles of relevance and trust, Google strives to match the best answer to the question it is asked.
Google wants to send its users content from a source that it is sure will satisfy its user, i.e., a credible brand or person it trusts.
To achieve this, Google first needs to know the user’s intention. When you search on Google or express a problem, Google is looking for a solution.
Even if you ask an incomplete or ambiguous question, Google tries to understand your intent to solve your specific problem.
Secondly, Google provides you with the most accurate, helpful, and relevant content on the web that reliably solves the problem to your satisfaction.
Search engines constantly browse hundreds of billions of pages by robots or “spiders .”These robots browse the web by downloading web pages to discover new pages that have been made available.
The web pages that the search engine has discovered are added to a data structure called an “index.”
The index includes all discovered URLs as well as several parameters relevant to the content of each URL, such as :
-Keywords discovered in the page content
-The type of content that is browsed
-The date the pages were last updated
-The previous commitment of the user of the page and domain
For you, as a blogger or marketer, SEO is the way to present your content to Google to ensure that your solution is the most useful, reliable, and appropriate for its user. In short, convince Google to recommend your answer or solution.
1. Deciding On a Subject
This can go without saying. In choosing a topic, you will have to make choices. The best SEO practice is to select a topic that is already popular to ensure that your audience already exists. This is how you can guarantee traffic to your website.
You can choose the topic of your article based on many things and ideas: what you like, something you are experiencing, a question you have been asked, Etc.
The best choice is to write about something you like, even if your niche is not as popular. Some subjects are more specialized than others and do not correspond to the type of research that people do every day. This means that your audience is also smaller, but there is a good chance that the competition will be too, which will help you rank more quickly.
Once you have chosen your topic, you can search around it to find keywords to optimize your blog article for SEO.
2. Find Related Keywords
If you want to increase the chances that search engines will pick up your content, it must be optimized for SEO and rich in keywords. The first step is to perform a keyword search. You can find keyword ideas using various free online software such as Jaaxy.
When you type your topic in the search bar, they will suggest each of the short and long-tail keywords and phrases you can use in your blog post. Each one will be accompanied by the search volume, which is an indication of its popularity.
It is good to have a viral keyword because it shows that people are searching for that particular keyword. But it also means that your content will compete with much other content on the same topic and may not be seen.
Sometimes by changing the order of the words in the key phrase, you can change the probability of getting a better ranking. It is a good idea to find synonyms and related key phrases.
3. Use Keywords in Your Blog Post
Until now, you have your subject, your main keyword, and you have also found synonyms and related expressions.
The best way to ensure that Google’s algorithm will understand what these keywords are and what is their related domain is to use these keywords throughout your blog post. A plugin like Rank Math allows you to adjust the number of keywords in your text.
The recurrence of your keywords, synonyms, and related phrases is significant because it sends a signal to Google about the content of the text. The algorithm is also intelligent and will detect associated synonyms and words, allowing your reader to rank for more keywords or at least more variations of the same topic.
4. Formatting Your Article for SEO
Title tags
A title tag is an HTML element that specifies the title of a web page. Title tags are displayed on search engine result pages (SERPs) as a clickable title for a given result.
The title tag is located at the top of the blog article. The title appears on your blog and at the top of the tab. The second title usually announces the content’s main topic, and the lower subtitle helps break the content into smaller sections.
The title tag of a web page is meant to be an accurate and concise description of the content of a page. Make sure your title is rich in keywords because the title tag is essential for your blog’s usability, SEO, and social sharing.
Watch that the length of your title does not exceed 60 characters. If your title is too long, search engines may cut it off by adding an ellipse (“…”) and omitting essential words.
Avoid writing your title in uppercase. It can be challenging to read for visitors and considerably limit the number of characters displayed by Google.
Paragraph length
The best practice in search engine optimization is paragraphs of 150 words or less. The length of the section has no impact on SEO. However, it does impact the readability of the content for Google. Google likes shorter paragraphs because they help break down content and are easier to read. Nobody wants to read big chunks of text.
Readability
Your content’s readability impacts SEO because, in its quest to display results to search queries, Google wants to show the best, most useful, and easy-to-use results.
However, if a text is difficult to read according to the algorithm’s standards, chances are people won’t want to read it.
Avoid using the passive voice too much. Make sure you use the active voice and keep your sentences short. It’s better to have shorter sentences and break the text down rather than making sentences of 20 or more words that are long to read that Google doesn’t like. Google likes structure, so use transition words to help the algorithm understand where the content is going.
5. Organize Your Snippets
The snippet previews what your page or article will look like in Google search results. It is displayed on your mobile and desktop and includes elements such as slug, title, and meta description.
The SEO title
The SEO title is the first thing people see in the search results of your articles and pages. It is the only thing people will see in many cases, so it must attract attention immediately!
The SEO title is the title that you will see in Google search results. It is not the title tag or H1. Although the title and title tags for SEO should be similar, they can differ, especially to meet SEO goals. Ensure your SEO title includes your keywords and reflects the subject matter of the content.
The meta-description
The meta description is a short paragraph that functions as advertising content for searchers. It is up to the searchers to decide if the content is relevant and contains the information they want in their query.
Since 2009, neither meta descriptions nor meta keywords have been taken into account in Google’s ranking algorithms, but they can nevertheless impact the click rate (CTR) of a page on Google. Google generally considers snippets at ~155-160 characters for meta descriptions.
To write the meta description of a page, you must intelligently use the keywords of the target page by creating a convincing explanation that the searcher will want to click on. It must be directly relevant to the page it describes and be unique compared to descriptions on other pages.
When you perform a search, Google searches for the particular keyword in the content and highlights it in the meta description. If your meta description doesn’t contain the keyword you’re looking for, it will take a “random” snippet from the page.
It should accurately describe the article’s or page’s primary content, include the key phrase “focus,” and encourage people to click on your result.
You can use synonyms or related keywords in your meta description to avoid repetition. Your primary goal should be to provide value and generate clicks.
The permalink & slug
The URL is the link that you will use to reach the content. It is the address. The slug is part of the URL that you can optimize for SEO and change to reflect the topic of the content. Including the key phrase will help Google and users to identify the topic of your post or page.
6. Optimize Your Images for SEO
Images are essential to the creation of content. They give life to the article and can contribute to SEO. Let’s also be honest, with today’s social media; the right images are all the rage. There are a few things you can do to help optimize your images for SEO and help improve the overall performance of your website.
First of all, choose images that are relevant to your content. Speed is essential for good SEO, and pictures often slow down a website. You can add a title and a caption to your images. People look at the pictures first and scan them to get a better idea of the content. Always add alternative text and use keywords so that it can be found in Google image.
7. Internal links
Internal links are hyperlinks that point to pages in the same domain. They help Google find, index and understand all the pages on your site. Internal links can also help send page authority to important pages. In short: internal links are essential for any site that wants to rank higher on Google.
Internal links are also handy to improve blog visit duration, traffic to your website, and reduce bounce rate. If you link your blog articles together, you can encourage a visitor to click on another piece and spend more time on your blog.
When creating an internal link in SEO, be careful about the anchor text you use.
Anchor text is the visible and clickable text of an HTML hyperlink. While using anchor text that matches the page you like won’t hurt you, mixing up the anchor text to avoid looking like spam is best.
Don’t use the exact anchor text for two different pages, and make sure the anchor text you use is relevant to the page you are linking to internally.
9- Make Your Site Shareable
Social media links help with SEO. Google uses links shared on Facebook and Twitter as a ranking factor, as social media is one of the best ways to promote your content and be found online.
If you create good content, people will like it and share it, which will create a link to that content and improve its ranking.
On the other hand, social media can always help you improve your SEO.
If you are active on social media people can find you because people are just as likely to click on social media as on a website. Some social media also search engines (YouTube, Pinterest, Twitter) and people can find you through a hashtag or a targeted search.
So social media can play an important role in Google rankings since sharing adds more visibility to your content. People can find you if you are active on social media because people are just as likely to click on social media as on a website.
Some social media also search engines (YouTube, Pinterest, Twitter), and people can find you through a hashtag or a targeted search. Social media can play an important role in Google rankings since sharing increases your content’s visibility.
If you want to encourage your readers to share your content and optimize your website as much as possible, activate social sharing buttons like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest at the top and bottom of your blog post.
The easier it is to share; the more likely people will do so. People can easily share your content on Facebook, Twitter, or Mix,
Conclusion
To create content that is easy to reference, you must consider essential factors to search engines’ rankings. SEO is such a vast subject that it cannot be fully covered in a single article. For beginners or experts, search engine optimization requires commitment and research of information, guides, and other tips.
Optimizing blog posts for SEO is a process that never stops because Google changes constantly, and the factors that affect the ranking change too. SEO requires constant work and attention, but it is worth it when it helps your business.
