Adding new blog posts to your website is an easy way to increase your visibility in the search engines and lure prospects to your website.

One tactic of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is to optimize each page or blog post around a keyword phrase that a person — your prospect — might be using when doing research on a search engine like Google or Bing.

So, how do you do SEO for blog posts?

When writing a blog post article with Search Engine Optimization in mind, we try to make the page focused on one idea and keyword phrase, and use that phrase multiple times throughout the page. We write for a human, but also give the search engines what they need to understand what each page is about. This improves the likeliness of the link showing up in someone’s search for the keyword phrase.

Choose a keyword phrase you think people might be searching on. For example, I picked “prevent content theft” and wrote this blog post about it:
http://www.reinhartmarketing.com/news/prevent-content-theft/

You’ll see I used that phrase “prevent content theft” in the URL, the page title, 4 times throughout the body of the article. Also used it in a meta description field that’s hidden from sight but specific for the search engine to show in result pages.

To make the page work a bit harder, I also used a complimentary keyword phrase throughout: “website content theft”. I try to write about 300 words, split up into easy to read paragraphs, and include a link to at least one other page of my own website. Using subheads, bullet lists and images can help break up the lengthy text to make it easier for the human to scan or read.

Within a couple of weeks of publishing the example article, it rose to the second page of Google’s search results:

SEO for blog posts example of Google search engine result page snippet

…and it appears half way down Bing’s first page of search results:

SEO for blog posts example example of Bing search engine result page snippet

That’s not bad for a brand new article. It may improve as time goes on.

So take some time to write about what you know and add it to your website regularly. Some simple SEO for blog posts can help increase visits to your website.

I hope you find this helpful and it encourages you to write more blog posts to draw traffic to your website. Good luck!

-Roland

Roland Reinhart, Website Management/SEOAbout the author
Roland Reinhart is a Digital Marketing Consultant and advises SBDC clients about building a website, driving traffic to that website, search engine marketing, search engine advertising, email marketing creating video, and more.

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