Ah, Blogs.......... They are among the three most common forms of media used in content strategy today, they are an incredibly useful tool that helps drive traffic to our sites and our services, Think about a Google search requesting to find an SEO specialist in Johannesburg. Google will provide several listings with top webpage results. These results reveal the searches that are the most organic out of the lot. Why is good google ranking great for your online business you would ask, well allow us to shed some light, Search Engine Optimization is the cornerstone of inbound marketing success.

According to Forbes, the first page of Google captures 71% of search traffic which are missed by lower-ranked websites. An increase in SERP (Search Engine Results Page) rankings not only boosts your business’ ability to drive organic traffic but also increases the extent to which your audience sees you as reliable. One of the first big steps to gaining good SEO on your website is to publish relevant content.

The easiest way to publish relevant content, and a lot of it, is blog posts. When creating a blog post that will boost the SEO of your site, it is crucial to publish content that both the search engine and the users can understand. If these two conditions aren’t met then it will be a continuous struggle to receive high rankings and win loyal visitors to your blogs, but if these criteria are met then you will earn a higher ranking and more engagements with your content (sharing on social media, comments etc.) It’s not always easy to start writing a blog, especially if you’ve never written anything before in your life.

Here are some steps to help with your first SEO friendly blog post. Make A Decision

Before you start you have to decide on what you’re going to write about, and remember the road of life is paved with flat squirrels who couldn’t make a decision, whatever you chose will be the first big step to conquering the mountain called Google ranking. Think carefully about the message you want to deliver. What do you want to tell your readers? And what would you like them to do at the end of this post? Write these answers down and think about the search intent these readers might have. Look for results with the search term you want to rank with to gain insight into this.

Keyword Research Say goodbye to blind guesses, you don’t have to worry about being a flat squirrel when you can do keyword research to find out exactly what your users are looking for. Keyword research is a way that content creators and SEO experts use to discover topics your users are interested in based on the search engine data. You can use these keywords to plan your content strategy. This will ensure that you write about topics your users are interested in and will help you find new blog post ideas. There are a lot of keyword research tools out there, some of these include Jaaxy and SEMRush.

Create A Title That Packs A Punch Never underestimate the power of effective headlines! Keep in mind that your title and your meta description are what shows up in the search engine so make them count. They will be chum in the water.

Write For Humans, Not For Search Engines After you’ve set your goal of joining the ongoing battle of SEO, your users can easily be forgotten, it’s important to remember that when a user searches online, they are looking for answers. The best chances for you to improve your ranking is through creating interesting, quality blogs. Keep your buyers’ interests in mind.

Alt Text On Your Images Alt text plays a huge role not only in the user-friendliness of your blogs but, also in the SEO of your site. The visually impaired uses screen readers to translate screen contents into synthetic speech, these little alt tags or texts describe to these users what’s going on in the picture as well as helps Google understand what’s going on in your post.

Catapult Content With Social Media Social media is a very handy tool when it comes to increasing the reach of your content. The power of social media lies in sharing. You can include social sharing buttons or promote your blog on your Facebook profile and your reach will expand almost automatically. There are a lot of other things you can do to maximize the SEO friendliness of your blog posts, hopefully, these few pointers will offer you a good start. The old days when a few SEO tricks were enough to make our sites rank well are long gone. Today quality content is King to writing successful posts and as long as you’re that one squirrel that can make it across, you might just inspire others to make the decision to follow.