SEO Tips for Blog Posts may not be something you search for everyday, but it is indeed something many small businesses are interested in. That’s the reason for this post and I hope you’ll find it useful.

8 SEO Tips for Blog Posts

1. Determine the keywords your post will be focused on.
   
   When it comes to SEO tips for blog posts, your first and foremost priority is keywords. You already have a topic for your post in mind, so you likely have some ideas for a keywords, however, your first ideas may not be the best. For example, my first idea for this post was not “SEO Tips for Blog Posts,” so you may want to do a little research to understand which keywords are going to get you the most search volume for the lowest amount of competition.You can do that by entering your keyword ideas into the Google AdWords Keywords Tool.

   It’s meant for use with Google AdWords, but it’s also very helpful for SEO research as well.The first (SEO for you and your blog) tool is your friend Google.For example if you’re writing a post about “Search Engine Friendly Blog Posts” search for that keyword term and look at the results.
   

   What do you notice? The competition looks very high and the keywords aren’t exactly what you’re writing about.If at first you don’t succeed… try again!

   If we look at “SEO for blog posts” instead we see the following:

   
   

   This is starting to look more promising, because we are seeing low competition and high volume.

   Further down in the list we see

   “seo for you” with low competition and search volume of 60,500.

   and

   “seo tips for blogs” with low competition and search volume of 1,300.

   and a combination of these should serve us well, so now we’re ready for Step 2.

2. Include keywords in your post title/heading.
   Since we found a couple of phrases with low competition and high search volume, we are going to go with “SEO for You and Your Blog | SEO Tips for Blog Posts.”  This allows us to get more volume of searches with “SEO for You” and also target our audience or people who are looking for help writing SEO friendly blog posts, with “SEO Tips for Blogs.”

3. Search for your title ideas in Google (SEO Tips for Blog Posts) to see what your competition is.
   ReSearch your competition based on the title your have defined to understand what you’re up against. Remember there are no competitors, only teachers.  What do the results you see from this search teach you?

   

4. Include keywords in hyperlinks in your post.
   Can you link to a related article, video or site using your keywords in a hyperlink?  If so, this will give you a boost in your search rankings.

5. Include the keyword phrase several times within the post, but no more than 5% of the post.
   Yoast is the best WordPress plugin for SEO for your blog. The plugin will tell you exactly what changes to make in order for each blog post to be SEO friendly.

6. Make sure the post is 400 – 800 words long
   Too short and there won’t be enough words for the search engine to understand the relevance of the article.  Too long and you will dilute the relationship between your keyword phrase and the rest of your content.  Don’t overload your post with the keyword phrase you have chosen. Just be sure that appears about 5% of the time throughout the content. The Yoast plugin for WordPress tells you exactly how much you are over.

7. Add alt tags to any images
   These help human visitors understand what each image is if they are viewing with images turned off and/or if they are visually challenged.  Search engine don’t mind if you include keywords in alt tags, but it is best to be as descriptive of the image as possible so that your blog post is most accessible.

8. Embed videos and/or add links to videos and other related content
   As with any blog post, it’s always good to add value and offer as much as you can to support your idea.  After all, good content is what people like to share and link to and those inbound links are also extremely helpful in SEO and your search engine rankings.

What are your biggest SEO and blog related tips and/or questions?