At its source, the main element that determines the search engine optimization of a blog post is in the contents itself. If the content is poor quality and not unique, no matter how many SEO tricks you try on the content, it will still never rank highly- you cannot cheat Google and other search engines.
There are many things you can do to SEO your blog post. However, some will naturally take longer than others. In this article, we’ll explore some quick-fire ways to boost your blog post’s SEO ranking to give it that extra push on search engines results pages.
Google your ideas
When you have a topic to create content about, use
Google to your advantage. Google auto-suggests highlights keyword search terms that others are searching for, that could relate to what you are writing about.
For example, let’s take a random example of the movie Shrek. If we were to make an article about the movie Shrek, we could search for what people search for on Google, using autosuggestion:
From this, we can see some good topics to talk about, when writing our content about Shrek, that we know gain lots of traffic in search engines.
Use a Table of Contents
A table of contents is a great and quick addition to a blog post that can improve SEO, as well as user experience:
- A table of contents highlights the main headings throughout your content, helping web users understand what you are going to talk about. It also helps web users click straight to the part of the article that they care about reading the most. If web users like your content more, and can understand it better, they are more likely to not click back onto search engine results, improving SEO efforts.
- Table of contents use hashtags links at the end of the slug, to enable the auto-scroll to the correct section. Google can, at times, pick this up and apply it to search engine results pages. For one of my websites, I have had many occurrences of extra links (like site link extensions for PPC, but organically) appear that reflected the links of the table of contents.
Analyse Competition for Key Search Terms
For the keywords you are wanting to rank for highest, look at what your competitors are doing and ask yourself a few questions:
- What does your content miss that your competitor addresses?
- What does your content address that your competitor misses?
- Who has a nicer theme for their website?
- Who’s website loads quickest?
- What type of content do they have? Do they have content + video/audio/images?
From answering these questions, you should be able to find holes in your blog post, that you can rectify to help outrank your competition – if you don’t address this, the likelihood is that you won’t rank higher than the competition unless the content is that much better than the competition.
