You were lucky enough to be born with a gift for writing, and now you’re writing blogs – terrific! But how do you enhance your blog format for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)? That’s an entirely different skill set. Let’s look at what will make your blog rise to the top of the search engine results page.
Why is It Important to Format Your Blog for SEO?
In this current day and age, people’s attention is being sought from all angles. TVs, billboards, phones, and even our watches demand our attention. When people are faced with so many options, you want to make sure that your blog is getting top billing. Having a blog formatted for SEO will guarantee that it will be at the pinnacle of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) and that your desired audience will see it before your competitors’ sites.
How Do You Make an SEO Blog?
Several steps with your blog format for SEO give search engines the information they need to recognize your blog and bring it to the highest positions on the SERPs and directly to your consumers.
These key steps are:
- Heading tags
- Bold keywords
- Alt-text
- Keyword rich text
Use heading tags with subheadings – While you will undoubtedly be utilizing subheadings with your blog format for improved readability, heading tags (also known as H tags) are also code that let search engines know that you are using subheadings and that these are essential words. Heading tags are known as an outline for your SEO blog.
Make those keywords bold – While you may use bold in your blog format to clue your readers into important words, this also alerts the search engine to pay attention. The code for bold alerts the search engine that this is a critical word and that this text is crucial.
Keyword-rich alt text to images – When adding images to your SEO blog, be sure to add text to the “alt text” field. When doing this, ensure that the “alt text” describes the image while including your primary keyword. As with all other tags and formatting tips, this will help you with your goal of search engine ranking.
Place keywords throughout the SEO blog – Beyond blog formatting, one of the essential balances to be found is with keywords. You want to make sure to have them throughout your blog, but not too many that your blog can be accused of keyword stuffing.
Keyword stuffing is considered a bad practice by search engines.
However, a nice balance can be found with your keywords included in the following:
- Title of your blog
- URL
- Top of the page, optimally in the first paragraph
- Strategically placed throughout the body of the post
With keywords sprinkled this way, your blog post should be readable and searchable!
Now that you have the tools to write a blog post for optimal SEO, pull out one of your old blog posts and see if you can update it for SEO! With an edit here or there, it’s easy to change your blog format to that of a top SEO blog.