When used to its full potential, including a blog on your website is a fantastic way of engaging with your customers and driving organic traffic to your website. It shows Google that your site is regularly updated (Google likes this A LOT), positions you as an authority in your industry, helps you target different keywords and allows you to answer questions your customers may have. Pretty great, right? To help you maximise these benefits, we’ve put together our top tips on How to Optimise Your Blogs and help drive organic traffic to your website.

Title/H1 tag

The blog post title is called a H1 tag and is the largest text on the page. It is often the first thing your reader will see, so it’s important to make sure your H1 accurately and concisely describes what your blog is about. It’s also a good idea to put your keyword or phrase into your title (this should happen naturally) as it assists search engine crawlers with determining what your post is about, speeds up indexing and increases the likelihood of you ranking higher on a search engine results page.

Use related keywords

The keyword to focus on (no pun intended!) here is related. Making sure that the keywords you’re targeting are actually related to your content is crucial. Similarly, you don’t want to keyword stuff your blogs nor do you want to use your main keyword or phrase every other sentence. In fact, doing any of these things can make your content look spammy and do more harm to your site rather than good. Instead, look for keywords and phrases that are related to your topic.

Fill in your metadata

This can be an easy one to overlook, but filling in your blog’s metadata is so important! With so many websites all competing for a user’s attention, filling in a compelling meta title and description that encourages them to click on your blog is vital. Plus, good metadata can help you rank higher in search engines – win win! To help you write good metadata, we’ve put together a few things you need to keep in mind:

• Be specific and concise.
• Stick to a 50-60 character limit for the meta title and 50-160 characters for the meta description, anything longer and it will get cut off.
• Include the focus keyword.
• Ensure your metadata is relevant to the content.
• Make sure all your metadata is unique, never copy and paste the same metadata for different pages.

Link to existing content

If possible, it is a great idea to link to existing content on your website. Only do this if the two posts either interweave or logically link together, don’t interlink with subjects that aren’t relevant to one another. Linking content together on the same website is called internal linking and when done correctly it offers some great SEO benefits to your website. It shows Google that you’re an authority on your subject and have quality and relevant content that website visitors may be interested in which means they’re more likely to rank your site higher. Similarly, it is very useful for your website visitors who may want to learn more about a certain subject and can help to avoid them clicking away to another website.

Optimise images

Whilst your words are (obviously!) the most important part of your blog images can enhance them. That said, when used incorrectly, images can do the opposite and create a bad experience for your user, so optimising them is essential. We’ve included a few tips below on how to make sure your images are optimised:

• Compress your images so they’re not too big. Image compression reduces bandwidth usage and ensures your page loads quickly.
• Add descriptive and relevant ALT tags. These help visually impaired users understand your images which improves the site’s accessibility and user experience. Plus, it tells Google what your images are about.
• Be consistent with your images wherever possible. Having images that are a range of different sizes or move between landscape and portrait can make your blog look messy, or worse spammy, which could put a user off. It’s best to pick how you want your images to look and then keep that style throughout all blogs you write.

We hope these tips have helped you to either get started on your blog or improve your current blog posts. Whilst it can take a bit of practice, getting your blog content right is really important for driving that organic traffic to your doorstep.

Struggling with your blog and need help with your content marketing strategy? Give us a call on 01566 232323 or email us at hello@mihidigital.co.uk