Optimizing your blog posts is very important, but it doesn't have to be very difficult. Here are five steps to guide you through the process of optimizing a blog post and ensure that your content gets found online.

2. If you've been doing your search engine
optimization (SEO) research, you know how
important maintaining a blog can be to your
website's SEO. You've no doubt come
across the benefits of blogging for your
business in countless articles and—not
without irony, I know—in blog posts across
the web.

3. Okay, you're thinking, I have to create a blog for my business site. But will simply
having a blog be enough to improve your site's SEO? If you haven't already figured it
out, here's your first lesson: never trust anything that sounds too good to be true,
especially if you've read it on the Internet. Thinking that creating a blog is enough to
improve your SEO is like thinking that buying a notebook will make you a successful
author. No, merely creating a blog is not enough to magically make your site the go-
to resource in your industry. You can't just write a blog: you also need to optimize it.
So, how can you optimize each blog post to maximize its SEO benefits?

5. I'm in no mood to get into a metaphysical debate
about the nature of matter, but that's not going to
stop me from making this next statement: you
can't make something from nothing. This adage
definitely applies to blog posts. You may think that
just having a great idea is enough to create a
successfully optimized blog post, but in reality, a
great blog post is inspired not by a spontaneous
burst of creativity, but by keyword research.

6. Of course, you will start each blog post with a
general idea of your topic. But you shouldn't begin
actually writing your post until you have determined
which keywords will help you optimize it. If
necessary, you can slightly adapt your topic to fit the
appropriate keywords. This will ensure that you can
organically incorporate the keywords into the prose,
thereby avoiding keyword stuffing and producing a
more natural experience for your reader. Creating a
great reading experience for your audience should
be your number one priority, as the tactics involved
are great for your SEO. Besides, you want people to
read your darn blog!

8. Okay, so after doing some killer keyword research, you came up with a
great idea and wrote an awesome blog post. Now what? It's time to
dress that baby up and take it out. The first thing you'll need? Why, a
dashing title, of course! If possible, your title should contain your
keyword. You should also make your title "clickworthy." If we humans
are nothing else, we are curious creatures. (Or is that monkeys? No
matter . . . ) Pique the curiosity of the average search engine user, and
you'll find that many more visitors will stop by to check out your blog.
Now, I'm not suggesting that your blog can be garbage with an
irresistible title. I'm just saying that fun—or at least intriguing—titles
often do better than straight-to-the-point, boring ones. That said, your
reader should be able to figure out what the post is about by reading the
title. It's a tricky balance—trust me, I know!

9. What else can you do to spiff up your blog post? First, you can create and properly format
relevant headings and subheadings (complete with keywords, if possible). These are
great for both your readers and search engines, as headings make your posts easier for
search engines to crawl and categorize and easier for people to read. After you've
formatted your headings, you should add images to your post. If done properly, images
are great for SEO. Keywords can and should be part of image names and alt text, as this
will assist search engines in determining how the images relate to your blog post, which
helps to bring in the right kind of traffic. You should also make sure your writing is
completely free of errors—everyone knows that bad grammar does not a successful blog
make.

11. I'm sure you've already learned about the importance of inbound links for SEO. When other
sites link to your blog, they are essentially telling search engines that you know what you're
talking about and should be trusted. But did you know that internal linking is also an effective
way to boost SEO? Think of internal links as threads in your site's web. The more threads, the
more obvious the connections are between different pages on your site. Creating these
connections also allows your user to navigate the different pages of your site more easily. The
text in which internal links are imbedded is called anchor text. The best way to add an internal
link to a blog post is to incorporate its anchor text naturally into the prose of your blog. So,
instead of saying, "To learn more about SEO, click here," you should say, "There's a lot to learn
about SEO." Just as you want to avoid keyword stuffing, you want to avoid using unnatural
anchor text or only using your blog post's keywords as anchor text. The anchor text should
relate as closely as possible to the content of the page to which it links while still sounding
natural on the page from which it links.

13. Optimizing a blog post is a lot of work for one person.
Luckily, you don't have to do this job all by yourself. Instead,
you can allow your readers to help you by sharing your post
via social media. Social sharing should be made as easy as
possible by adding social sharing icons to each post. You
should also encourage your readers to share the material
they like or find helpful. Enabling comments on your blog
posts can be another way to improve SEO, though many
factors may contribute to your decision to enable or disable
blog post comments. The more your readers engage with
and share your content on social media, the greater your
content's reach will become. A greater reach generally
means a higher search engine rank.

15. How many people do you know who sit at their computers browsing the Internet? Now, how
many people can you think of who regularly check in on their phones or tablets? These days,
most people actually spend more time on their mobile devices than they do on their
computers. Let's say you've followed all the advice given so far in this article, and now one of
your followers has shared your blog post on her Facebook page. Her friend, who is scrolling
through Facebook on his iPhone, clicks on the link to the post. Because it has not been
designed for mobile use, the post is either impossible or very difficult to read. Do you think the
friend of the follower is going to take the time to get on his computer just to read that blog
post? No. Will he ever read it now? Not likely.

16. Guess what else recently decided it doesn't like sites
that aren't mobile friendly? Google. Thanks to
Google's newest algorithm update, it's more
important than ever to make your blog mobile-
friendly. As you probably already know, when it
comes to SEO, Google is the boss. It doesn't matter
how much you dislike its rules—if you don't play by
them, you're out of the game. So make your blog
mobile friendly already, all right?

17. Thanks for reading! Check out our blog, or follow us on Facebook or
Twitter to get more helpful information about content marketing!