SEO in 2020: Top Hacks and Tips for Optimizing Your Blog

When it comes to digital marketing for small businesses, one of the tips you’ll often hear is the need to have a blog.  Sometimes this can be confusing to people who associate the word blog as being an online journal where people share about their days — however, marketing blogs are much different than an online diary. 

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Instead of sharing personal stories, a marketing blog is more focused on sharing knowledge within a specific industry. For example, if you own a pet store, you would want to create a blog focused around pet care. 

When a blog is SEO optimized, it can increase the amount of organic traffic to your website. This allows you to reach a larger audience and potentially see an increase in sales. 

If you’re a small business owner that is considering starting a blog, you’ll want to develop a basic understanding of SEO before launching your blog, then continue to work to further optimize it. 

SEO — What is it? 

One of the first steps you’re going to need to take is having a basic understanding of what is SEO and how it works. In simple terms, trustworthy sites with quality content and good authority links rank higher on Google; when done correctly, SEO helps Google trust your website. 

It might sound simple, but SEO is much more complex because you also have to develop an understanding of how search engine algorithms work. There are also good tools to monitor your rankings such as a serp ranking tool.

Use keywords and search phrases

Quality content with carefully selected keywords can increase traffic. However, spamming your blog with keywords can hurt your ranking. Instead, you’ll want to place those keywords or search terms in strategic places, such as the meta description, headers, and anchor text. 

Determining keywords requires research. There are online tools and resources available to help you. If you’re just getting started, you can also see what keywords are being used on blogs that are similar to yours. If you want to better understand the importance of keywords and SEO then visit here, where you can find lots of helpful advice.

Add internal links 

Using keywords in anchor text is a good practice, but you need to think about where that anchor text leads too. When crawling websites, Google uses links to determine which pages are important. 

When a page is linked to multiple times on different pages, it signals to Google that the page is significant. So, when you internally link to your homepage in multiple posts, you increase the chances of your homepage ranking high.

Add external links too 

External links are just as important as internal links. Linking to a high-quality third party can help make your content seem more trustworthy. Good external links boost your site’s relevance. 

One of the tricks to choosing good external links is to pick authority sites that are already established within the industry. Authority sites are trusted sites that contain well-written, factual information. They’re also sites that already receive a high amount of traffic. Authority sites vary by industry. 

Improve readability 

Well-written blog posts that are easy to read can improve your SEO. Google algorithms can read and scan texts in a human-like way. And most people tend to scan blogs to get the information they need, instead of fully reading.

Lengthy posts, long sentences, and challenging words can make your posts more challenging to scan. Instead, break your posts up using headers, write appealingly, and use a logical structure. 

Use a meta description 

The meta description is a brief snippet that appears in Google searches, allowing people to know what a page is about. Some people don’t put much thought into this description — but a good meta description can improve your SEO and your click-through rate.  

When creating a meta description, write something that summarizes the post in two sentences. It should contain keywords or variations of keywords, as well as make people want to click on your site. 

Don’t forget old posts 

Many people have the habit of creating posts, but never going back and revisiting them. As you work towards optimization, you’ll want to regularly go back and revisit them. There are a few ways to do this. 

You can incorporate new, relevant anchor texts or work on improving the readability of the post. You can also reshare the most well-written posts on social media. Also, don’t forget to internally link to old posts. 

A few final thoughts 

SEO is complex, but it is something that all site owners should understand. If you’re just getting started with a blog, use the above tips to help you start optimizing it. As you continue to improve your site and gain more organic traffic, you’ll want to look into other tips that can further boost your SEO.

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