How to Optimize Your Blog’s On-Page SEO

When total strangers are coming to your site merely on the recommendation of a search engine, you can feel pretty famous. But to really build a successful blog, you need to keep those readers coming back for more, and you need to keep getting new visitors – and the SERPs (search engine results pages) are great places to get those visitors!

Search engines love fresh content first and foremost. Your blog is an asset because it continually posts content that is highly relevant to your audience. But you need to make sure you’re always posting about what is on your audience’s mind.

A number of HTML elements can affect your blog’s on-page SEO, so don’t forget to put some thought into your title tags, image attributes, and Meta descriptions. You also need to make sure that the rest of your content is underscoring what your attributes and descriptions say.

That’s where keyword research comes in: it can help you create better, more targeted content, and help make sure you have the right keywords in your meta tags.

How do you do keyword research? If you are like most bloggers, you simply start writing something that you think relates to what you do. But what if that’s not what your future readers are looking for, and you miss out on traffic and attention because you wrote an article about “how to make a chocolate donut” instead of “chocolate donut recipes”?

How do you change? Do you have to start guessing word combinations? Of course not! Instead, check out some great keyword research tools that will give you the titles of your next blog posts.

Here are some keyword research tools to start with:
• Keyword Discovery – provides tutorial videos that show you how to use this tool.
• Wordtracker – specializes in providing related words and long-tail keyword phrases. Also includes a free trial of software.
• WordStream – simple to try out, but subscription-based.
• Google AdWords Keyword Tool – the more competition there is for a keyword, the more you know people are searching for it.
• Google Insights for Search – allows you to see data from specific locations and time ranges.

These tools tend to be pretty simple: enter the keyword, and it will return a number of related search terms that people are using right now, as well as how many people are searching for each word or phrase. Start checking out a couple of their free trials and see if they give you any good ideas for new blog posts. Free trials will also let you see if any of the tools work well enough to be worth a subscription fee.

To decide what keyword to start with, imagine that you were trying to find your business, but you didn’t know the name of it. Or ask your customers what they would search for if they had to find your business website and couldn’t use the name. This could reveal interesting word combinations, especially if your customers don’t know the right jargon or industry terminology to describe your business precisely.

Don’t forget to pay attention to the long-tail keywords, or keyword phrases that are longer than three or four words, as well. Though long-tail keywords are less common, they also have less competition. And when writing a blog, you have room to fit in a number of long-tail keywords without having them clumped together and seeming unnatural.

Long-tail keywords are also important because you know that the user is looking for something specific. If you can attract their attention and provide what they need, you’ve found a loyal fan or a buying customer. Long-tail keywords tend to convert much better than short, simple keywords.

Most importantly, make sure that you are using your blog (and all the keywords in it) to explain what your company actually does. Don’t be afraid to use casual language, because people are going to be searching the way they speak, and their terminology probably won’t be perfect. But if you can understand each other, you’re a lot closer to making a sale.

How much does keyword research affect your blog posts? Is your blog a major source of search engine traffic? What is holding it back? Add your comments and check out the advice of others below!