Get in the routine, optimize your blog!

On my journey throughout the blogosphere, I’ve come across many blogs that just don’t get the traffic they should. In doing a little more research I find that the blog posts are often well written, comprehensive, and up-to-date. However the page rank is zero and there’s a number of indicators leading me to believe that nobody reads this blog.

If you happen to find yourself in a situation similar to this, there are a few tactics you can begin to use in order to better optimize your blog. By following a simple, straightforward optimization routine, your blog will progressively improve over time. Implementing some standard SEO tactics will increase the chances of your blog ranking better in the search engine results, and in turn increase traffic to your site.

Position at least one keyword in the title.

Even if you have done little to no keyword research when you write your blog, you most likely already know your business’ top performing keywords. Search engines appreciate and reward relevant titles. So rather than using a title such as “New Shop Opening in Atlanta, Georgia!”, write “New Ice Cream Shop Opening in Atlanta, Georgia!” Think of your blog posts title much like you would a press release. After all, your objective is to attract new visitors to the website. Write every title as if your audience has never heard about your business before. Remember, your potential reader has to sift through a tremendous amount of information in order to find your post. The more relevant you can make your title, the more likely they are to find your page.

Make sure to shorten your URL.

Although WordPress automatically creates a URL out of your title tag, it’s often a good idea to shorten the title even further. For instance, a post called “The Best Way to Make a Hot Fudge Sundae” might be cut to icecreamshopblog.com/the-best-way-to-make-a-hot-fudge-sundae. This is not a terrible, being that there are keywords in the URL, but it is not optimal either. Shortening the URL to icecreamshopblog.com/make-hot-fudge-sundae is much cleaner and will rank better. In this post the key term is “hot-fudge-sundae”, so in cutting out all the extra verbiage, we’ll rank better for that term.

Incorporate the search term 2 or 3 times throughout the content.

As soon as you’ve completed writing your content, go back and find out where you can mix relevant keywords. Four times is just about the most you need to mention a keyword; anything more than that will appear to be spam to search engines and to your readers.

Optimize your images.

Because search engines cannot recognize pictures, alt text is the main component the search engine looks at when crawling images. By providing relevant alt text for each image (alt text is the keyword or title for your image), it will help the search engines know what that media is about. Image title is vital in that it often plays an important part in the URL of your image. For example, entering the image title “ice cream cone” in WordPress will result in an image link that looks like icecreamshopblog.com/2022/11/ice-cream-cone.jpg. Compare this to keeping the original file name of Img_218.jpg, which will result in the URL icecreamshopblog.com/2022/11/Img_218.jpg, which isn’t search engine friendly.

Tag your posts.

Tags help fellow ice cream lovers find their way to your ice cream shop blog. They also assist engines like Google to index your website. Whenever you tag a blog post as Ice Cream Recipes, a page will be created that looks like icecreamshopblog.com/tag/ice-cream-recipes. The tag will contain links to all posts you’ve tagged with Ice Cream Recipes. Should you have a number of articles on that topic, Google may view your blog as knowledgeable in this area.

It is really not that hard to start an optimization routine for blogging, and results can show up within a few weeks. The secret is to keep up with the routine. It’s best practice to keep up and think about the optimization process as you write your blog posts. The hard part is researching and writing your blog post, the optimization is easy. Don’t let that good content go to waste!