How to Make Your Blog Search Engine Friendly

Blogs are for people and optimization is for machines, but a website needs to please both visitors and search engines. So what is the answer? Start by adhering to the first content cardinal: never create content solely for SEO. Instead, you should aim to produce information that is useful to site users. The trick here is that SEO benefits from useful content! Longer visitor engagement is encouraged by relevant, useful information. Additionally, it is simpler for search engines to identify and index high-quality information.

Follow these five fundamental principles and you’ll optimize for SEO and humans alike.

1. Write about topics that matter to your audience

By choosing the appropriate topics for content generation, you can begin the process of optimizing your blog. What topics are important to your audience? What are some common queries and terminology used to describe legal problems? Look through your old emails for ideas and language. Once you have a theme in mind, you should conduct keyword research to support it. Both Google and companies like SEMRush and Moz’s Keyword Explorer provide tools to make keyword research easier.

2. Create compelling and descriptive article titles

After writing an excellent article, you still need one final component: a compelling title. A good title does not have to be clever or fancy – but an article is not truly dressed to go out in public without a title as its final accessory. Use statistics sparingly and avoid vague click-baiting. Be as descriptive as possible without sounding robotic. Tell the reader what to expect. The best strategy is to title the article with the actual question or keyphrase your article answers. A title like “89% of elderly Americans don’t have this important document on file” is neither accurate nor sympathetic to your users. Instead, try “What is the purpose of a medical directive and how do I set one up?” Descriptive titles instill confidence in readers that their questions will be answered, and they also help search engines understand the focus of the content. Furthermore, article titles show up in the SERP. As a result, good titles can help with click-through rates – especially if the title addresses the exact question being asked by a searcher.

3. Serve up relevant content, as appropriate

A smart way to get visitors to stay on your site longer and further engage with your content is to serve up relevant content. Have you noticed the way that Amazon helpfully suggests products to shoppers? At the bottom of every listing, there are several additional links to related products. This personalization strategy results in a ton more sales, not to mention the extra data Amazon receives by tracking which links you click. Include topical internal links in every article to encourage people to click around and explore content related to a single topic. Then, add a live section below each article titled. We thought you might also enjoy these articles with active links. To have the latter, tagging is required, allowing your web developer to build a dynamic section that pulls the most recent relevant articles based on selected tags or categories.

4. Focus on delivering comprehensive information

Comprehensive blog posts are one of the absolute best strategies for pleasing both readers and search engines.

What is a comprehensive blog post?

• Long-form
• Extremely detailed
• Related external and internal links

Strive to be a one-stop shop for your visitors’ legal inquiries. The key to this strategy is thoroughness. Try to answer every single question and include every relevant link. Bring all the information you have about a topic together in one place, leaving no stone unturned. In addition to delivering value to site visitors, these comprehensive pages are also more likely to be linked to other websites, aiding in your backlink strategy.

5. Prioritize the user experience

Finally, we know that Google favors websites that deliver a better user experience – and users prefer good websites, too. So, what are the three main elements of a good user experience? You should prioritize fast load times, mobile responsiveness, and accessibility. To be fully accessible, your blog must facilitate a good online experience for individuals using assistive technologies. If your posts have videos, be sure to include captions or make a transcript available. If your blog has photos, make sure that each photo includes an accurate alt text description of the photo (not a stuffed keyword tag). Accessibility overlay tools are not a good solution.

Review and next steps

Blog posts must be written for humans and optimized for algorithms. The key to optimizing articles for search engines is creating valuable content.

Valuable content should include these five elements:

• Relevant topic and popular keywords
• Compelling and descriptive title
• Suggesting related content to increase value and keep visitors on the site longer
• Comprehensive, thorough information
• Good user experience (load time, mobile responsiveness, accessibility)

Great content and SEO can be a challenge – but it doesn’t have to be a mystery.

Conclusion

Blog Marketing is a content marketing strategy. The marketing strategy uses blogs to address potential customers directly and individually, thus achieving customer loyalty for their brand. This type of marketing uses viral marketing methods in which an interest group is built based on a blog.