Hello everybody! I’m Caitlin McDonald with Boundless Marketing. Today I want to talk a little bit about SEO or search engine optimization.
Search engine optimization is even more important now than ever has been in the past. The reason is because article creation in general has shifted over the past year or two years. Basically there are so many different players out there, which is phenomenal, but in order to stand out you have to work even harder than you had to in the past. Especially if you’re just starting out, these blogging tips are really going to be helpful as you are making a position for yourself.
I have a couple of tips for you. The first ones we have talked about in the past, but then I’ll go into more detail, as well.
The first tip is that when you are writing those blog posts, don’t shy away from writing longer blog posts. We used to always emphasize splitting longer blogs up between part one, part two, and part three so that in one piece of content you’re going to be linking to different pages. Now it’s actually a lot more important to have longer blog posts. I recommend going up to 5000 words within a single blog post. This is because when you’re really writing that depth about something you’re providing very valuable information to your clients and to your readers.
The next piece is when you’re writing a blog post that this longer, such as 1500 words long, you need to make sure that you’re dividing the content up into different sections. We do this by utilizing heading tags, bullet points, bolded words, etc. Now, heading tags are very easy to implement. Basically, when you’re writing, you’re going through and need to figure out where the obvious divisions are in your content. Are you coming up to a point where you’re going to be talking about five tips to do something, followed by five ways to implement it, and then techniques for follow up? Each of these is a clear division in the content. All you do is you highlight the text, and in the text editor you select the text style for Header 1, Header 2, Header 3 etc.
Which header tag you choose really this depends on how long your content is and how frequently are inserting the breaks in content.
This last piece we haven’t talked about before is using different types of media within your content. Right now, as you can see, I’m doing a video, but I’ll also have the transcript and some images. By creating and including diverse types of media in your blog post, you can help your post rank higher in your industry or in your category for specific keywords.
In general, not every reader is going to learn the same. Somebody who is more into listening and looking rather than reading, is going to be drawn to one type of post rather than another. Additionally, within posts you want to create the images that are going to be shareable. Having those shareable images really helps with the optimization for Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, etc. If you don’t feel comfortable with filming a video you can also do a podcast. That’s another great way to increase the different types of media that you have on the site.
Now the next piece that I recommend doing is sharing all of your information or knowledge as downloadable resources and freebies on your website. I’ll go into more detail in that in a later post, but these tips will point you into the right direction as you’re jumping into using search engine optimization on your blog posts.