How important is SEO for blogging?

Blog post SEO is essential for your blog’s long term success. Whether you are blogging for money, traffic or just working on your corporate blog, it is important that you use proven SEO techniques to rank higher in search results.

SEO will help you create amazing blog posts that both users and search engines will love. Once you learn how to do this correctly, everything else becomes easier. Here are my tips to optimize your blog:

Write your blog post with SEO in your mind

One of the most common mistakes many bloggers make, is that they think about SEO after they finish writing their blogs and not before.

It is SEO that will guide you on what to write about and how to promote it.

Define your goals

Each and every piece of content that you publish on your blog, should have a clear and specific goal. for e.g. if you’re blogging for money then you need a rich content website that can make money through Adsense, Affiliate marketing, etc.

Keyword research

Now that you have set the goal of your blog post, it’s time to do your keyword research.

Keyword research will help you:

• Find out which keywords to target
• Come up with a good post title
• Optimize your post (on-page SEO)
• Understand user intent
• Create SEO friendly content
• Understand the user

The next step is to start thinking about the actual content of your post i.e. what to write about.

To successfully do this, you first need to understand the ‘user intent’ and also find out what type of content Google wants.

User intent simply means what information a user is looking for.

Analyze SERPS

The best and most effective way to find out what type of content satisfies the user intent and how long to make your blog posts, is to search for your keywords in Google.

Optimize your blog post

Even if you are an experienced blogger and have written SEO friendly posts in the past, it’s always good to revise your work before you hit the publish button.

Promote your blog post

After hours of hard work, you have finally managed to publish the blog post.

Now it’s now time to start thinking about blog post promotion.

Even if the goal of your post was to get in touch with your subscribers or customers, it’s always a good practice to try and push your post.

Measure and evaluate the results

Provided that you have your Google Analytics setup correctly (with goal tracking), you will be able to see:

• How many people visited your new blog post
• How much time they have spend on the page
• From what channels (organic, email, direct, social) you got traffic
• How many leads (or sales) were generated because of the post
• How much money you earned from AdSense or Advertising (if you are monetizing your blog through ads)
• How many people signed up to your newsletter
• How many shares (likes, tweets) you received

Conclusion

Don’t forget that blogging and SEO is a continuous learning process.

There are so many things to take care of when running a successful blog that makes it impossible to get it right all the time.

It’s normal to make mistakes or to omit some of the best practices but it’s very important that you learn from your mistakes and make your next blog post better.