Search engine optimization is the lifeline and the blood of, pretty much, every website out there – it is what gains the traffic. Without a high ranking for search phrases, many websites would not gain the amount of traffic they do. Making sure you are well optimized for search engines, in terms of every post you publish, is key to the amount of traffic that comes to your website.
There are many many techniques you can adopt to a post to improve the search engine ranking of it. However, instead of going into the knit and grit of small changes to improve SEO of a post, I will stick to what you can change about your post/s to get the biggest SEO benefits.
It should also be noted that such tips do not apply to when you are creating new posts. For that matter, such tips can be used on old content that has already been published. Just because a post is old does not mean the SEO of it cannot be improved.
It should also be noted that good SEO always stems from having good content. If the web users that land onto your content stay on it for a good amount of time and share it, that will illustrate to Google they found the content useful, giving them more reason to rank it higher. For this reason, as well as helping Google understand what your content is about (the better they understand it, the better the ranking), these tips will look to make your content better reads for your traffic.
The Post Structure
All posts should adopt some sort of structure to aid crawl robots from search engines, as well as break up the content for web users. This usually includes:
- Introduction
- Brief overview of the headings of the post, if it is long (1500+ words)
- Headings to break up the content
- Conclusion
Keyword Density
As much as it is important to have keywords littered throughout your introduction and content, having too high a keyword density can be just as bad as having one that is too low. This is because a higher keyword density tends to make the content read worst, as well as not supporting SEO efforts with search engine crawl robots (too high a keyword density and Google can clock onto this pretty easily, hence why the WordPress plugin Yoast flags a red flag when keyword density is too high).
Utilizing Formatting Techniques
There are many ways to make your content read better to the web user. One of the best ways, without changing any of your content, is to change how your content is formatted. By this, platforms such as Blogger and WordPress allow the user to do a range of formatting techniques to content, such as:
- Bold
- Italics
- Bullet points
- Lists
-
Quotations
Strike through- ♠ <– use special characters
- Change the colour of the text
All of this can help to portray what you are trying to say to the reader easier, by adding weight to certain content whilst keeping other content formatting as standard.
