Blogging forms one of the cornerstones of a strong inbound marketing campaign, along with social media marketing and SEO. The best inbound marketing campaigns understand that the three disciplines work best when properly integrated. You promote your content via social media, which in turn creates links that support your SEO.
Your keyword research (SEO) helps you identify what keywords you should target with your content and so forth. If you want to get the most value from your inbound marketing, you need to make sure that all three components are properly leveraged.
3 tips for optimizing your blog for SEO
Link related posts
Some of your blog posts are likely to be more popular than others. “More popular” means they were linked to more frequently, have been viewed more times, have the most comments, rank well in the search engines and so forth. You can leverage the popularity of those posts to bring up the SEO value of some of your less popular posts with internal linking.
Every time one page links to another, it passes along a little bit of its trust factor in the form of link juice. The more links a page has pointing to it, especially when it comes from other quality pages, the more valuable it will look in the eyes of the search engines.
Linking related posts also helps keeps your readers engaged for longer. They can delve more deeply into a specific topic and further their own knowledge. It also shows that you are an expert on that given topic, as you have written about it more than once. Interlinked posts can also help your readers discover related information that they weren’t intentionally looking for, but may find useful.
Submit posts to social networking sites
A post, no matter how well written or useful it is to your readers, is only useful for your SEO if people actually find and read it. You can’t just throw posts up online and wait for your target audience to find you. There is so much clutter and noise out there (thousands of cat videos to be watched!) that you have to really promote your content if you want people to find it.
Social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+ are the perfect platform for content promotion.
First off, by publishing content on your social profiles, you are giving your network a reason to interact with your brand. It reminds them that you are there and you have something they should check out.
Once they are actually on your profile, a snippet of the latest blog post can capture their attention and get them engaged, but they have to click through to your actual blog to finish the post. This is a great way to build valuable inbound links and drive targeted traffic to your site.
Secondly, the search engines have admitted to taking social signals into consideration when determining how well a site ranks. This means that the more times your content is shared/Liked/tweeted/posted/bookmarked/etc. the more valuable it is. Highly valuable content is much more likely to rank well in the search engines.
The power of social signals means that you not only have to submit your content to social networking sites, but you also have to make it easy for your readers to share. Incorporate social share buttons into your blog and encourage your network to share your content with their own connections.
Target related keywords for SEO
There is a fine line between targeting related keywords in a blog post and keyword stuffing. You never want to write a blog post that has been over-optimized specifically for SEO. Above all else, your content MUST be written for human readers.
However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t take a well-written blog post and make it a little more SEO friendly. Once you’ve written your blog post, go back and research what related keywords the topic of the post centers on.
For instance, this post is about making a blog more SEO friendly. I could target keywords like “blog SEO”, “blogging optimization”, “SEO for blogs” , “blog management”, “link tracking” and so forth. See if you can naturally incorporate those keywords into the body of your blog post, as well as the title, headlines and URL structure. This will help your blog post rank well for related search queries.
Please share your thoughts and your SEO strategies in the comments. Share this post if you found it useful.
Nick Stamoulis is the President of Brick Marketing a full service SEO and social media marketing company. With over 12 years of B2B SEO experience, Nick Stamoulis shares his knowledge by posting daily SEO tips to his blog, the Search Engine Optimization Journal (or SEO Journal) and publishing the Brick Marketing SEO Newsletter, read by over 150,000 opt-in subscribers. Contact Nick Stamoulis at 781-999-1222 or [email protected]
Linking related post is by far the easiest and one the best tips. Anyways, check out our Elegant Themes giveaway. You might get lucky
Ricardus,
I’m glad you found the tips useful!
Thanks for commenting,
Nick
You can also take a second look at your old posts to see what long tail keywords they are hitting on and then optimize them a bit more to focus on those keywords. That way you can raise the rankings of your old posts.
Richard,
Great idea! There is a lot of value to be had in re-optimizing your old posts. As long as the information is still relevant, why not try to get a second life out of them.
Best,
Nick
Very informative post! I learned so many things from your post. Especially about blogging. Those tips are awesome. Thanks. I really appreciate your post.
Laura,
I’m glad the tips were helpful. Happy blogging.
Nick
Nice post! I would like to add one more point is to add sitemap to your blog so that search engine can locate the important pages.
Worli,
Great point! You want to give your blog every chance for SEO success. The sooner your new posts can be indexed the quicker new readers can discover them.
Thanks for reading,
Nick
Linking to your other posts is probably one of the easier and least time consuming things you can do. Sometimes all you need to do is re-word a sentence or two so you can link to another post. I don’t know if there is a perfect number of links to another article per post, but your probably don’t want to add tons of them.
Ray,
I don’t think there is a “perfect” number of links for anything in SEO! I would say, depending on the size of your post, link to one or two other posts at the most. I don’t even create links from every post because I don’t want to give my readers too many options.
Best,
Nick
All tips are known,and i read the third tip also on so many sites.But i think with the example i got a little more to understand and implement on my blog posts.Hope it helps me in getting visitors.Thanks to Mr. Nick.
The more times you hear it the more it sinks in! You’d be amazed at how often I have to repeat myself sometimes before the message really hits home.
Best,
Nick
That’s so true.Sometime we need to read something again and again.Everytime we read we understand something which we skipped in last time.
Thanks for the share, very informative article.
Hi Nick, By linking to related posts, I’m assuming you are referring to internal linking, not linking to outside blogs. I haven’t found a decent related post plugin that actually shows related posts, at least not related in any manner I can see. Do you recommend manually adding them below the article?
Hi Brian,
Yes, I meant linking to related posts on your blog. I try to limit the amount of outbound linking I do (why would you want to accidentally send traffic to another site!) unless you are quoting someone or referencing a report or something like that. I just manually link to related posts within the post itself (great chance to target related keywords). Sometimes I add a “to learn more about X, check out this other post” type sentence at the end.
Best,
Nick
Hey Nick, I like your firt tip of internal linking. Squeeze that link juice out of the powerful posts to help nurish the less powerful ones. Nice post
Great blog! Your tips are really good. I took your advice and it did work. Thanks a lot for the big help!
Hey Nick, Your tips are really good. I like your first tip of internal linking. I took your advice and it did work. Thanks a lot for the big help!…Keep it up Mate…
Nice post. I would also like to add to the social sharing tip. It’s recommended to make sure your audience is using social media to find content. You wouldn’t want to spend time writing content and put it on social media so your customers never find it. Solving this would be to know your audience and know where they like to socialize. It may not be Facebook or Twitter, but certain discussion forums.
Great point Lionel! It’s important that you don’t waste your time/effort posting content where your audience isn’t. You have to figure out what social networks they use and how!
Thanks,
Nick
Hey Nick,
Great tips as always. I find it kind of unbelievable that there are still bloggers who dont interlink their blog posts. I mean, its easy, yet very powerful and effective when it comes to ranking.
Interlinking posts is also great for reducing bounce rates.
Thanks for these tips. I am following all those, so as to make my blog SEO Friendly.
optimizing blog for search engine is really amazing to learn .. i would love to read more from your side
Thanks for these tips. I will work hard and optimize my blog for search engines!
…and post new articles everyday. All love something new.
So linking to my posts increase traffic
And linking to other blogs too?
Nick, completely agree with the points mentioned by you. Internal linking is importance and so is sharing on social media in these present times….additionally, ensuring that relevant keywords are added to title and body of the post does goes a long way as well….
Great information on how to optimize your blog for SEO. In the past, I never bothered with submitting my posts to different social networking sites but recently I submitted a few blog posts and there was a surge in the number of visitors, it does really work!
Good tips for blogging newbies. Really love reading this post. Without SEO our efforts online will go vain for sure.
Wow.. Nice and important ways for bloggers to optimize the blog. Yes targeted keyword, social media sharing and link related posts are the awesome ways to drive more traffic. Thanks for sharing and keep writing..
Hello Jane,
You have written well on Blog SEO, I think making backlinks is the major part for doing SEO of a blog. This activity increase the traffic, blog worth, PR and SERPs as well.