If you want to attract and obtain customers online it’s almost essential you maintain a blog nowadays. Sounds simple enough right? Wrong. It isn’t enough to just write plain old articles and post them. If you want visitors coming to your blog you need to write SEO optimized blog posts. Optimization however is not a one-step process, which is why I’ve come up with a few tips to help you get started!

1. Do Your Keyword Research

To ensure your blog posts are coming up when users are searching for information you want to include keywords in your posts. But which words and phrases are your buyer personas searching for? This is where keyword research comes into play. You can use tools such as Google Adwords Keyword Planner to find out the words and phrases your audience is searching for and then naturally place them throughout your post. These keywords will therefore make you not just relevant but much more competitive in your field.

2. Consider the Reader Experience

It’s important to create content that includes your keywords, but overall it needs to be reader friendly. To ensure your readers have the best experience possible it is recommended that you use headlines and subheaders, add in bullet points and lists, and don’t even think about including long, run-on sentences. If your readers like your posts they’ll keep coming back, which lets search engines know your creating quality posts.

3. Create an Intriguing Title

Titles are like the door to your content. In most cases they determine whether or not the reader goes ahead to read the entire post. When it comes to SEO, it’s essential to include your keywords in the title as this tells Google what your article is about and allows them to index it accordingly.

4. Use Anchor Text

Anchor text is the highlighted words or phrases used when linking to another website. Be sure to include links to other web pages on your site as this will communicate to search engines which pages you find most important. Now, instead of pointing your anchor text and links to multiple different pages you may want to point them to a page that is already ranking well in order to further advance it’s SEO weight.

5. Include Images

Humans are naturally attracted to pictures, be they static or motion images. For SEO purposes it’s important to include your keywords in the file name of the image. You will benefit more from using an image labelled my-new-dalmatian-puppy than IMG00117.JPG. The other important place to include keywords is in the image alt text. As Google has a hard time “seeing” images the alt text describes the subject matter of the file and helps Google determine the best image for the searcher’s query.

6. Share Your Content

Lastly, you need to inform your audience of your posts. Social media is a great place to start. Place a preview of the copy on Facebook, Twitter and any other social media sites your audience is active on and be sure to have a link to the original post. Social sharing is starting to have a large impact on search engine rankings as it increases the amount of inbound links and traffic to your page.

There’s no promise that you will see a spike in traffic over night to your blog posts as search engine optimization techniques may take months to kick in. But it’s a good idea to start now and be patient, as it will be worth the wait.

Are there any other tips you have for optimizing blog posts for SEO? Share them below!