Blog SEO is important for your business, because it helps you to consistently get more and better traffic to your business website. There are a number of things you can do to optimize your blog posts for SEO. While the best time to optimize this content is while you are creating it, you can always go back and update your previous posts in order to enhance them as well. Today we are looking at some of our top tips to optimize your  blog posts for SEO.

  1. Plan Your Content Around Your Keywords

When you first start creating content for your website, you may write about topics that you think potential customers would be interested in based on nothing more than wild guesses. It does not have to be this way. You can and should be doing keyword research to help you learn what topics your potential customer base are most interested in. There are many programs and plugins you can use that will tell you which keywords are the most searched and generated the most clicks. This will help you target your writing to your customers.

  1. Internal Links Are Your Friend

Once you have a decent catalog of blog posts available on your website, you should make it a habit to include links in your new posts to refer readers to your old posts. This not only improves your SEO rating for your current article, it also ensures that your older articles will get new traffic as well.

  1. Make It More Appealing with Images and Videos

To put it plainly, images and videos are more engaging than just plain text. Users will scroll past a page with just text, but they will stop to look at an image or watch a video. Therefore, search engines tend to prioritize pages that include images and videos. Be careful, however, not to infringe on copyrights. There are a variety of sources for royalty free images that you can use in your blog posts. You can also create your own images and videos for use in your blog posts.

  1. The Easier to Read, The Better

One important factor that too often gets overlooked is readability. Articles that are easier to read tend to get higher rankings in search engines. This means proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation, using shorter sentences and shorter paragraphs, and breaking your article up into easy-to-follow sections like bulleted lists or under subheadings. Whatever SEO plugin you use will have a readability checker to help you gauge what does and does not work for users.

  1. Make Your Posts Comprehensive

In your keyword research, you should have come across what is called “Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords” or keywords that are semantically related. Once you have targeted the keywords that you will write about, you can then use the semantically related keywords to create new content. This content covers the variations in wording of user searches. Thus, utilizing these semantically related keywords makes your website more comprehensive, and therefore more useful in search engine results.