In the digital age, organizations have a defined content marketing strategy with an allocated budget. Most organizations with a digital strategy have a separate blog site that is also required to be optimized to ensure their benefits can be used to the fullest. The need for optimization is more critical as the blog site can gain more impressions; move up the SERP ladder and bring in more viewers to the site. The need to optimize your blog increases manifold when you come to know that there are already more than 500 million blogs existing on the internet.
While we know that SEO will improve your rank, the issue remains that the search engines utilize a sophisticated algorithm that determines the rank of your blog site. The best we can do is to incorporate best practices that are prevalent in the digital marketing space. We will now discuss the various steps we can take to improve the rank of our blog sites using white hat SEO techniques.
Start Using HTTPS by Procuring an SSL Certificate
Google does not notify its factors to rank a website. However, it had explicitly mentioned that websites that use HTTPS encryption would be rewarded by boosting their rank during search results. HTTPS is the protocol that secures the connection between the web server and the browser used by the viewer.
Towards this end, the website needs to procure a cheap SSL certificate. There are so many such providers of cheap SSL certificates. The ideal and the best among them is the Extended Validation Certificate which provides the most robust encryption level and ensures that the website has passed a vigorous validation test.
Using the Focused Keywords Intelligently
You should be undertaking exhaustive keyword research for your blogs. These keywords need to be inserted into the blog by maintaining the optimized keyword density. You can also use plug-ins like Yoast that will help you to understand whether the selected keywords match well with your blog. The keywords will then be required to be utilized for on-page SEO activities. It will include having them in the webpage URL, the title tags, and the meta description. It ensures that the crawler can understand that the webpage content is related to the keyword, and the ranking is improved.
Also Read: Reasons Why Your Small Business Needs SEO
Optimize the Design of Your Website
The website should be such that it does not require much time to load on the web browser. It is of prime importance as the search engines will penalize your website if it takes too much time to load. These days your viewers will mostly try to access the blog site through their mobile devices. You should ensure that the site is accessible from all devices and can be viewed optimally through mobile devices.
Search engines also check whether there is an alt text for all the images on your website. You should have the alt text with the focused keywords for that webpage. The URLs of the blog pages should also be SEO-friendly by ensuring they are short and separated by a hyphen. The URLs should depict the topic that is discussed in that specific blog page.
Submitting the sitemap on the search console allows it to have a bird’s-eye view of your blog site. It also allows the search engine to crawl the blog pages easily.
The Depth of the Content
The topics should be chosen with care. It is effortless to check the topics that are currently receiving the highest viewership. You can also go through the blogs of your competitors and the industry leader to check what topics they are writing on. Also, check the relevant hashtags for the topics they are writing on. While writing the content, the writers should get into the shoes of the reader and write from their standpoint. The content should be gripping enough to encourage more readership. More visitors to your blog site will ensure that the ranking of the website also increases. The writer can take a specific stand and should answer queries that any reader may be having.
Also Read: 7 Powerful Law Firm Content Ideas to Boost Website Traffic
Promote the Blog Through Unique Methods
It is said that your search rank will improve with the number of visitors to your blog site. So, you must ensure that your website is marketed well. One of the means to do this is to promote the site on social media. You need to research the related hashtags with most shares and followers and tag them to your blogs also. Moreover, you can also include the social sharing buttons on your blog pages. It will allow your viewers to share the content on their social media pages if they like it.
It serves to create links that would route back to related blog pages on your site. While you can cross-link associated pages on your site, you can also create links when you write guest blogs on other sites too. Links from third-party websites also help. You will need to inform other relevant bloggers about the relevant content on your site. If they feel the content is trustworthy, they will create links back to your site.
Conclusion
You cannot rest assured that your blog site will do wonders on its own. You should ensure that the blog site needs to reach out to the expected audience. To do this, you need to provide some basic white hat SEO practices are in place. We have discussed some of the SEO techniques in this article. It starts with procuring a cheap SSL certificate and moves on to having a mix of on-page as well as off-page SEO best practices.
We hope that our readers will be able to understand what is expected to ensure the blog site ranks higher up in the search results. It will, in turn, increase the reach of the blog site to your target market. Though the SEO best practices change; the basics remain almost the same.
Also Read: 4 Things I Want Everyone to Know About Blogger Outreach
