Why Is Blog SEO Important?

Search engines are a super important traffic source for blogs.

In fact, a recent survey of over 1000 bloggers found that SEO was their 3rd most important source of traffic (just behind email marketing). 

Our own blog is living proof of the power of SEO. Sure, we get a fair amount of traffic from Twitter, LinkedIn, email and direct traffic. And added together, these sources make up the majority of our monthly traffic.

But Google sends us over 396,000 visitors per month.

 

Without blog SEO, our site’s growth would have been much slower.

And if you want to learn how to optimize your blog for SEO, check out these tested SEO tips.

Find One Main Keyword For Each Post

Every blog post that you publish should be optimized around one keyword.

If you optimize your post around lots of different keywords, Google and other search engines get confused. They don’t know what your content is actually about. But when you focus on a single keyword, Google can easily understand that your post is about that one topic. So your first step is to find one main keyword for your post. If your blog is new, I recommend focusing on long tail keywords at first. That’s because long tail terms aren’t super competitive. To find long-tail keywords, type a term into Google search and check out the keywords that Google suggests underneath the search bar. You can also use a nice little free tool called Answer The Public. This tool generates a list of question-based keywords that you can optimize your post around. 

(Besides keyword research, this tool is great for coming up with content topic ideas.) Optimize Your Blog Post Now that you’ve found a long tail keyword, you want to optimize your post around that term. There’s no need to stuff your keyword a million times on your page. That’s called “keyword stuffing”. Keyword stuffing used to work back in the day. But it can do more harm and good today. Instead, you want to include your keyword in a few key places on your page.

 

Most CMSs (like WordPress) have a title field at the top of the post. And you want to include your keyword in your blog post title and your page’s title tag.