So you wrote new content for your website and now you’re ready to get it posted. Before you do that you’re going to want to optimize it for SEO. You spend all this time writing your blog post or web page, so lets make sure it gets found. In this post we are going to look at tips you can use to optimize your blog post.

Title Tag

The purpose of a title tag is to briefly describe your page content to both your visitors and the search engines. The title tag is displayed on the top bar of Internet browsers so users know what page they are on, but most importantly, it displays as the title of your page in the search-engine results. Creating relevant keyword based title tags should positively affect your SEO efforts. When writing a title tag you will want to include keywords that represent the page content. However, you’ll want to make sure it’s done naturally and avoid keyword stuffing. In order for your title to display properly in the SERPs, you will want to keep it between 50-60 characters.

Meta Description

The meta description provides an explanation as to what is on your page for users. While meta descriptions are not important to search engine rankings, they play an important role in gaining search traffic. This is your chance to draw a user in. When writing a description you should try to include keywords when possible, although they will not affect your ranking, Google does highlight keywords that users are looking for in bold, which helps your result stand out and could increase the likelihood of a click through. Also, you will want to make sure there is a call to action to encourage users to click through. The recommended length of a meta description is 156 characters.

Heading Tags

Heading tags are elements of your blog post that define headings and subheadings on your page. These tags help with user readability, highlighting the main points to a reader skimming over your page, but can also help with your SEO. Having keywords in your heading tags has a positive effect on your SEO, acting as indicators to the search engine about your pages main topics. Headings are defined from H1 to H6, H1 is the most important tag on your page with the highest authority, while H6 is the lowest level heading. It is important to remember that it is best practice to have one H1 per page, which will define the subject of your page to the search engines, proceeding headers should be tagged as subheaders (H2-H6).

Natural Mentions of Keyword

Hopefully you thought about your keywords before you started writing, but if you didn’t don’t fret. You will want to go back through your post and identify keywords used in your content, as well look for additional opportunities to add keywords where they would naturally fit. Keywords do not need to be exact match, for instance, the term “SEO management project” can be used as a mention of the keyword “SEO project”. Once you identify the keywords, you can crosslink these terms to a page that ranks for the word on your site or a related blog post. Not sure which page ranks for the term on your site? You can easily find out by conducting a site search on Google seen as follows, [keyword] site:[yoursite.com]. This is a great opportunity for you to build keyword authority. However, you will want to be careful not to over do it, keyword stuffing will have a negative effect on your SEO.

Alt Text

Alt text is a text description that is added to the HTML tag that displays an image on a web page. Since search engines cannot read images when they crawl a site, they use alt text to inspect the element. When constructing the alt text for an image you want to be sure to describe what is in the image in a concise manner. Additionally you will want to include keywords where they fit, but once again be cautious of keyword stuffing.

When writing content for the web there is no magic formula to rank #1 in search engines, but there are small steps you can take to help improve your rankings. As Google continues to update their algorithm, quality content will continue to be one of the keys to a strong SEO strategy. What are some steps you take to optimize your content for SEO?