In this day and age, a blog is a crucial component to any company’s website. It benefits your business by bringing more people to your website, keeping them there for longer and giving other websites something to link back to in addition to improving the overall quality and authority of your digital presence.

The days of writing for search engines are long gone as the importance of captivating your audience has been emphasised more and more. That said, there are still a number of things that you should do in order to search engine optimise your blog posts.

While blog posts are fairly simple to wrap your head around, there are a plethora of other components of good SEO that a website needs. Hiring the help of a professional SEO service to handle these tasks is the best way forward.

SEO Northern Ireland company WSI Digital has been in the business for almost 10 years and offers a comprehensive service that will increase your rankings and drive quality traffic to your website by developing a bespoke strategy for your business. On-page and off-page optimisation, high authority backlinks and local results are just some of the many great services on offer.

Title Strategically

Search engines pay a lot of attention to the title of your blog posts when trying to understand what the page is about. It’s important to use your primary target keyword while still having a readable and attention-grabbing title for your audience. You simply need to find a natural way to include it.

Use Headings

Headings not only make your articles more digestible to readers, but also give Google a chance to grasp the main topics of your post, thus improving your rankings. Be sure to keep a good balance of keywords in your headings without making it look unnatural.

Optimise Post Length

Google prefers longform articles to short posts, which is why many businesses tend to focus on in-depth topics on their blogs. Your posts should be a bare minimum of 300 words. That said, too long and it might scare users away, so be sure to keep the long posts for compelling topics.

Include Links

Internal linking is especially important for not only SEO, but also drawing visitors to other parts of your website. You should also include a few outbound links to authoritative websites in order to improve the legitimacy of your business. Be sure to use anchor text that relates to the target keyword of the post you’re linking to.

Nail Your Meta Description

Meta descriptions don’t necessarily influence your SEO ranking, but a well-written one will significantly improve the way your post looks on search engine results pages. A good description makes use of the searched for keywords, as they’ll show up in bold in the results.

Always do Your Research

You can use tools such as the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to determine the appropriate keywords for your blog post. Again, it’s important to keep it natural and avoid keyword-stuffing.

When it comes to modern SEO, quality always trumps quantity, and this applies just as well to your blog posts. Take care of your posts when putting them together and they’ll take care of you.