What Goes Up Must Stay Up: How Your Blog Can Stay First on SERPs
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an undeniably goal-oriented art. It isn’t something you can apply willy-nilly, hoping for the best – not if you want to see results, anyway. You need to know what you want to achieve, how you’re going to make it work for your website, and what results you hope to see before you even think about giving it a go.
The obvious aim is to use it to get your website into first place, on the first page of results when people search for your chosen keywords, but this isn’t much use unless you also know how to keep it there.
Taking it back a step, you might be wondering why it’s so important to put it in the first place, to begin with. It’s all to do with driving traffic to your website. Sitting in second is great – a real result – but it means getting four times fewer click-throughs than the website above you. If you want to maximize your sales as much as you can, there’s only one position you want to be in, and stay in too.
So how do you do it? Once you’re up there, here are our top tips and tricks to stop you from sliding right back down…
1. Keep using long-tail keywords
If you’ve managed to get your website to rank in the first place, we’re going to assume you already understand the importance of keywords and how they work. The essential thing at this point is to keep using them.
Of course, what you don’t want to do is overstuff your content with them – it’s a cheap trick, and one that Google will pick up on – so focus on the overall reader experience as much as your SEO. You want what you write to feel natural and engaging, so settle on just one or two keywords per post.
Using long-tail keywords will be especially effective since website visitors searching for these will usually have a more qualified idea of what they’re looking for; put differently, posts that use these will be bringing in the kind of traffic that actually converts.
2. Think about where you’re using keywords
It’s not only about using keywords to make your website as SEO friendly as possible but about the way in which you use them. Your keywords, therefore, ought to be focused on certain parts of the text more than others, including:
- Your title: The titles of your blog posts will be heavily utilized by search engines to determine the relevancy of the content to the search being performed, so always try to include a keyword here. This should be placed within the first 65 characters, to ensure that the important parts are visible to the searcher too (after this point, the title is usually cut off on search engine results pages).
- Your headers and body: Although it’s fine to include keywords in your headers and body, don’t force them in unnecessarily. Focus on making your content as engaging and user-friendly as possible, and you’ll find that the opportunity to include them will present itself naturally.
- Your URL: Search engines will also use your URL to work out what your page is all about, so make sure you optimize this on every post you publish by including at least one or two keywords in it.
- Your meta description: Your meta descriptions are one of the primary pieces of content that search engines and readers will use to work out what it’s all about. Take advantage of them accordingly.
3. Mobile optimize your site
On to tip three. If you’re wondering what mobile optimization has to do with SEO, the answer is ‘a lot’. More people use Google from their mobile phones than their desktops, and when they do, the search engine makes sure that mobile-friendly results are displayed first.
This makes a complementary design essential to strong SEO strategizing, whilst having the added boon of improving the user experience. What’s more, it ensures that your blog pages retain a single URL rather than two separate ones, so that inbound links back to your site don’t have to be split, and the SEO power gained from them can be centralized to enhance your post’s value and improve its ranking position.
4. Use your meta descriptions
You’ll have noticed above that we encouraged you to place keywords in your meta descriptions, but it goes further than this: you need to be focusing on how you can optimize these, not just treating them as an aside.
You see, the meta description is the text accompanying the link to your page in search engine results, and what the readers will use to find out what your blog is about and whether it has what they’re looking for. In short, it’s what’s going to help them decide whether or not to click through to your site.
As well as being engaging, it really ought to include the long-tail keyword you’re hoping to rank for too because if you’re going about blogging the right way, it should be highly representative of the actual contents of the post you’re hoping to promote.
5. Link internally
This last tip is a good one: do your very best to spot an opportunity where you can use internal links to other pages on your website. Why? Because in the same way that inbound links can be utilized to assess the validity or relevancy of your content by search engines, so too can their internal counterparts.
This has numerous boons: firstly, it’s going to organically drive traffic to your other pages, which is never a bad thing; secondly, it will help to convince search engines that the content you’re using has some real authority to it.
Follow these five simple tips and tricks, and you’ll find that staying at the top of your game is the easiest thing in the world.
For more fantastic insights and expert advice, feel free to take a look at the many resources we have on our site. We hope you find them helpful.
About the Author
Anna May Trogstad is Head of Support and Content Delivery Manager at Copify, the global copywriting service.
Source: SEO For Growth