Optimising blogs isn’t all about the keywords, although they are an important part of getting your content recognised and keeping it relevant. I’ve taken a look at both sides of blog creation – from the content itself to the layout on your website – to help you create blogs that will engage your audience and boost your website traffic.
Optimise your blogs through engaging writing
Your blogs have two readers: your website visitors, and Google. So you need to engage your audience of people with well-written, interesting copy, and get recognised by the Google bots through search engine optimisation. Here are some key blogging optimisation techniques:
- Keywords: Identify one or two key messages you want to focus on in your blog, and be recognised for – for example, if you’re a financial planner, you’ll want to use terms that focus around money management and mortgage advice. While this is relevant to your audience, Google will also begin to recognise what your business does, and rank you in the search engine when someone searches for a financial planner in their browser. Make sure to incorporate these keywords into your headings, title, and throughout the blog. We’ll look at keywords in more depth in the website design section.
- Structure: Ensure you’re breaking up your blog into digestible chunks. It’s proven that nowadays, readers scan, rather than read. Research firm Nielsen Norman Group found that 79 percent of users always scan any new page they come across, with only 16 percent reading word-by-word. So, make use of short paragraphs and bullet points to get your point across in a less long-winded way.
- Links: Include in your post references to reliable external websites and studies; and internal references to other blogs written by you. These internal and external links will boost your SEO. Search engines also love backlinks – this is where another site links to your blogpost. If you generate excellent content, other people will link to it, which increases your authority as far as the search engine crawlers are concerned.
Optimise your blogs through website design
High-ranking blog content doesn’t just boil down to the writing itself. From a web-design perspective, here’s what to focus on to get the most out of your content:
- FAQ modules: Frequently asked questions are helpful to website visitors because they anticipate queries they may have about your product or service. Sharing FAQs makes you seem helpful and knowledgeable, and can save you time by allowing website visitors to help themselves – though if you want people to call, you can of course tweak the wording to encourage this. Even better, FAQs provide relevant content that helps Google understand your business. An FAQ module is also a good way to add variety to your content.
- Add in related articles: A key aim of SEO is keeping your website visitors on your website as long as possible – we call this a visitor’s session duration. Session duration is the fourth most tracked Google Analytics metric, and is something many business owners aim to boost as effectively as they can. At the bottom of your blog, see if you can add a functionality that links to your most recent articles or related blogs that your visitors can click on to get more information, thus staying on your site for longer.
- Link to an author: Again, this option will make for longer session duration as website visitors have another location to go to where they can read about your team in more detail. If you’re using a guest blogger, a link to their website will gain you external link brownie points. And do remember to ask your guest blogger to link to your blogpost. This is known as a reciprocal link, and it means more backlink brownie points from search engines.
- Titles and headers: This is where our trusty keywords come back in. To rank higher for the keywords you care about, make sure you’re incorporating them into your blog title and subsequent headers, and utilising heading text formats. Google reads these headers and titles to get more information about what your website does, so use them wisely.
- Meta-tags and alt descriptions: Some content management systems will let you edit a page’s meta tag. This is a snippet of text that describes a page’s content within its HTML code. Alt descriptions (or tags) are bits of text used to describe a picture. Alt-tags improve your page’s accessibility by describing images for people using screen readers; and they also give search engines even more information about your content. In the same vein as title tags, populate your meta- and alt-tags with information about your website using keywords. The more fleshed out your blog page becomes, the more worthy of a higher ranking it becomes.
- Shareability: Adding in a social media sharing module allows your content to be seen in more places, so why wouldn’t you use it? Encouraging your readers to share your content more easily with social sharing platforms could open your blog up to a new audience.
Eonic’s free blog structure resource
To help our website visitors and clients with their blog writing, we’re offering a free download of our blog structure. To access this resource, sign up to our e-newsletter below.
[FAQ] How can Eonic help me optimise my blogs?
All of these features highlighted in this blog are available out-of-the-box with ProteanCMS – the platform we at Eonic deliver the majority of our sites on.
If you would like to discuss how we can add these features to your existing site, we’d love to hear from you. We are also happy to review your site in terms of how well optimised your blog is for SEO.
If you are already a ProteanCMS user, contact one of our team for more information.
There are two aspects to producing great blogs – effectively written content and the technical blog design on the website itself. I hope these insights were helpful in informing your blog strategy. If you still need a helping hand, sign up to our newsletter below to receive your own free blog template to get started.