10 SEO blog tips for search engines optimize the content of your blog

1. Concentrate on 1-2 long tail keywords that match the intent of your ideal reader.

Optimizing your blog posts for keywords is not about incorporating as many keywords into your posts as possible. Nowadays, this really affects your SEO services because search engines consider this keyword stuffing (that is, include keywords as much as possible for the sole purpose of ranking highly in organic search).

Nor is it a good experience for the reader, a ranking factor that search engines now prioritize to ensure that it responds to the intent of its visitors. Therefore, you must use keywords in your content so that you do not feel unnatural or forced.

A good rule of thumb is to focus on one or two long-tail keywords per blog post. While you can use more than one keyword in a single publication, keep the focus of the publication narrow enough to allow you to spend time optimizing only one or two keywords.

Why long tail keywords? These longer and often question-based keywords keep your publication focused on the specific objectives of your audience. Website visitors looking for long-tail terms are more likely to read the full post and then search for more information about you. In other words, it will generate the right kind of traffic: the visitors that perform conversions.

2. Include these 1-2 keywords in specific parts of your publication.

Now that you have your one or two keywords, it's time to incorporate them into your blog post. Where are the best parts of your publications to include these terms so that you get a high rank in the search results?

There are four essential places where you should try to include your keywords: title tag, headings and body, URL and meta description.

Title tag

The title (ie the title) of your blog post will be the first step of a search engine and reader to determine the relevance of your content, so including a keyword here is vital. Google calls this the "title tag" in a search result.

Be sure to include your keyword within the first 60 characters of your title, which is almost where Google trims the titles on the search engine result pages (SERPs). Technically, Google measures by pixel width, not by number of characters, and recently increased the pixel width for organic search results from approximately 500 pixels to 600 pixels, which translates to around 60 characters.

Long title tag? When you have an extensive headline, it is a good idea to get your keyword from the beginning, as it could be interrupted in the SERP towards the end, which may affect the perceived relevance of your publication. In the following example, we had a long title that exceeded 65 characters, so we loaded with the keyword for which we tried to classify: "SEO on the page".

Link the search engine result with a title optimized by keyword

Headers and body

Mention your keyword in a normal cadence throughout the body of your publication and in the headings. That means including your keywords in your copy, but only in a natural way and easy to read. Do not overdo the risk of being penalized by keyword stuffing. Before you start writing a new blog post, you probably think about how to incorporate your keywords into your post. That's a smart idea, but it should not be your only focus, not even your main focus.

Every time you create content, your main focus should be what matters to your audience, not how many times you can include a keyword or keyword phrase in that content. Concentrate on being useful and answering any questions that your client has asked you to reach your publication. Do that and, generally, you will find that you naturally optimize important keywords.

URL

Search engines also check your URL to find out what your post is about, and it is one of the first things that will be crawled on a page. You have a great opportunity to optimize your URLs in each publication you publish, since each publication is in its own unique URL, so be sure to include your one or two keywords in it.

In the following example, we created the URL using the long tail keyword for which we were trying to classify: "examples of email marketing".

Link the search engine result with a URL optimized by keyword

Meta description

Later in this publication, we submergeLet's go a little further in the meta descriptions. Your meta description is intended to provide search engines and readers with information about the content of your blog post, so be sure to use your long term so that Google and your audience are clear about the content of your publication.

At the same time, keep in mind that the copy is very important for the click rates, since it satisfies the intention of certain readers. The more attractive, the better.

3. Make sure your blog is compatible with mobile devices.

Did you know that more people use a search engine from their mobile phones than from a computer?

And for all those valuable search queries that are made on the mobile, Google first shows the results compatible with the mobile. This is another example of Google that greatly favors the websites suitable for mobile devices, which applies since the company updated its algorithm Penguin in April 2015.

(HubSpot Clients: Breathe easy - All content created on the HubSpot platform automatically responds to mobile devices.)

So, how do you make your blog compatible with mobile devices? Through the use of "response design". Websites that respond to mobile devices allow blog pages to have only one URL instead of two, one for desktop and another for mobile devices, respectively. This helps the SEO of your publication because the incoming links that return to your site will not be split between the separate URLs.

As a result, it will centralize the power of SEO that it obtains from these links, helping Google to more easily recognize the value of its publication and classify it accordingly.

Professional advice: the value of search engines changes constantly. Make sure you are aware of these changes by subscribing to the official Google blog.

4. Optimize the meta description, and use the entire space.

To review, a meta description is the additional text that appears in SERPs that allows readers to know what the link is about. The meta description provides users with the information they need to determine if their content is what they are looking for and, ultimately, helps them decide whether to click or not.

The maximum length of this meta description is greater than it was before, now around 300 characters, suggesting that you want to give readers a clearer view of what each result will give them.

Then, in addition to being easy to read (convincing and relevant), your meta description should include the long tail keyword for which you are trying to classify.

Link Google results with extended meta description

In the previous example, I looked for "examples of bulletins by email". The term appears in bold in the meta description, which helps readers to establish the connection between the intention of their search term and this result. You will also see the term "Electronic Bulletin" in bold, which indicates that Google knows that there is a semantic connection between "electronic bulletin" and "electronic bulletin".

Note: Nowadays, it is not guaranteed that your meta description will always be included in SERPs as it was before. As you can see in the previous image, Google extracts other parts of the publication of your blog that include the searched keywords, probably to give users an optimal context on how the result matches your specific query.

Let me show you another example. Below is an example of two different search queries that deliver two different snippets of text in Google SERPs. The first is the result of the query "no index does not follow" and extracts the original meta description:

The second is the result of the "noindex nofollow" query, and in the first instance of these specific keywords appear in the body of the blog post:

While there is not much you can do to influence what text you get, you must continue to optimize these metadata, as well as their publication, so that the search engines show the best content of the article. By creating easy-to-read content with the natural inclusion of keywords, it will make it easier for Google to demonstrate the relevance of its publication in the SERPs.

5. Optimize the alternative text of your images.

Blog posts should not only contain text, but should also include images that help explain their content. But search engines do not just look for images. Rather, they look for images with alternative text.

Because search engines can not "see" images in the same way as humans, the alternative text of an image tells them what an image is about, which ultimately helps those images to be classified in the images. results of Google Images. The alternative text also offers a better experience for the user, since it will be displayed inside the image container when an image can not be found or displayed, and can improve accessibility for people with low vision using screen readers.

Technically, alternative text is an attribute that can be added to an HTML image tag. The following shows what a full image tag might look like (added bold for emphasis):

HubSpot Clients: The SEO Panel will recognize if you have optimized your images or not. Although these elements are not as important as some other optimizations, they are still necessary (not to mention they are easy to add).

6. Do not use too many labels of similar themes.

Theme tags can help you organize the content of your blog, but if you use them in excess, they can be harmful. If you have too many similar tags, search engines can penalize you for having duplicate content.

Think of it this way: when you create a theme tag, you also create a new site page where the content of those theme tags will appear. If you use too many similar tags for the same content, then it seems that the search engines show it several times on your website. For example, the labels of topics such as "blogging", "blog" and "blog posts" are too similar to each other to use in the same publication.

If you are concerned that your current blog posts have too many similar tags, take some time in the near future to clarify them. Choose between 15 and 25 theme tags that you consider important for your blog and that are not very similar to each other, and then just tag your posts with those keywords. That way, you will not have to worry about duplicate content.

7. Use URL structures that help your visitors.

The URL structure of your web pages (which are different from the specific URLs of your publications) should make it easier for your visitors to understand the structure of your website and the content they are about to see. Search engines prefer the URLs of web pages that provide them and site visitors to understand the content of the page.

This differentiation is integrated into the respective URL structures of the HubSpot blogs. If I decided to go to the Marketing section from this main page, they would take me to the URL http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing. If we want to read the Sales section, all we have to do is change where it says "marketing" in the "sales" URL: http://blog.hubspot.com/sales. This URL structure helps me understand that "/ marketing" and "/ sales" are smaller sections, called subdirectories, within the larger blog.

What happens if there is a specific article that we want to read, such as "How to do a keyword research: a guide for beginners"? Its URL structure, http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-to-do-keyword-research-ht, denotes that it is an article in the Marketing section of the blog.

In this way, the URL structure acts as a categorization system for readers, allowing them to know where they are on the website and how to access the new pages of the site. Search engines appreciate it, since it makes it easy for them to identify exactly what information searchers will access in different parts of their blog or website.

Get more good practices for the URL structure from Moz here.

8. Internal link when possible.

Inbound links to your content help shows search engines the validity or relevance of their content. The same goes for internal links to other pages of your website. If you have written about a topic that is mentioned in your blog post in another blog post, e-book or web page, it is a good practice to link to that page.

You may have noticed that I've been doing that from time to time throughout this blog post when I think it's useful for our readers. The internal link will not only help keep visitors on your website, but it will also display your other relevant and authorized pages in the search engines.

HubSpot Clients: The SEO Panel automatically suggests linking to other internal resources on your website. Think of it as the solution to your SEO and at the same time help your visitors to get more information about your content.

If you are looking for more internal links to add to your publication but you are not sure which one would be relevant, you can click on "Explore some internal links that you could use in this publication" for a list of recommendations.

9. Use the Google search console.

The Google Free Search Console contains a section called Search Analysis Report. This report helps you analyze clicks on Google Search, and is useful in determining which keywords people are using to find the content of your blog. Learn how to use it by reading this blog post written by my colleague Matthew Barby and visiting the official Google support page here.

If you are interested in optimizing your oldest and best performing blog posts for traffic and potential customers, as we have been doing since 2015, this tool can help identify fruits that are in a low place.

Line chart showing the performance of keywords in the Google Search Console

A lot of content marketers struggle with optimizing their blog posts for the search. The truth is that your blog posts will not begin to be classified immediately. It takes time to build the search authority. But when you publish blog posts frequently and constantly optimize them for the search while maintaining a reading experience based on intention, you'll reap the rewards in the form of long-term traffic and leads.

10. Use topic groups.

The way that most blogs are currently structured (including our own blogs, until very recently), bloggers and SEOs have worked to create individual blog posts that are categorized for specific keywords. The result is disorganized and it is difficult for the user to find the exact information he needs. It also causes your own URLs to compete with each other in search engine rankings when you generate multiple blog posts on similar topics.

This is what our blog architecture used to see with this old playbook:

Flow diagram of the SEO model of the HubSpot thematic cluster

Now, to classify in the search and respond better to the new types of queries sent by search engines, the solution is to use the cluster model of topics: choose the general topics for which you want to classify, then create content based on specific keywords related to that theme that all are linked together, to create a broader search engine authority.

Using this model, this is how our blog infrastructure looks now, with specific topics surrounded by blog posts related to the topic, connected to other URLs in the cluster through hyperlinks:

A set of groups of topics for SEO

This model uses a more deliberate site architecture to organize and link URLs to help more pages on your site rank on Google, and to help users find information about your site more easily. This architecture consists of three components: content of pillars, cluster content and hyperlinks:

SEO model using icons for content of pillars, content of clusters and hyperlinks

We know that this is a fairly new concept, so for more details, see our research on the subject, take our SEO training or the video below.

We do not expect you to incorporate each of these best SEO practices into your content strategy immediately. But as your website grows, so should your goals in the search engines. Then you can do a bit of link building to get other websites to link to your blog!

Once you identify the objectives and intent of your ideal readers, you will be on track to deliver organic content that is always relevant to them.