Blogging has evolved. It is no longer meant solely to showcase your writing skills, provide information, or discuss current issues, but is increasingly becoming a promotional tool that is being used by businesses small and large. However, blogging to better promote your product or service is not easy and requires a different strategy.

As a blog writer working to get your or somebody else’s business noticed, the most important first step is to optimize your blog posts to make them more web search friendly. If you don’t heed this need, then, according to blogger.com, you may join about 65 percent of businesses who have missed out on this promotional tool by not bothering to update their blog in the past year.

To seize the advantage, it is most important not only to provide fresh and relevant content through your blog, but also perform basic blog optimization. We give below 7 of our best tips to optimize your blog for web search.

#1 Research well

For a blog to promote business, simply writing it well may not provide the kind of exposure you’re looking for. Proper exposure requires the inclusion of keywords. This is due to the fact that search engines are programmed to pick up keywords and make blogs visible to whoever is searching for that particular information/keyword.

Therefore, it is important to conduct a keyword research for on page optimization. There are several tools and techniques that will help you in finding related keywords that are relevant to your blog. You can take the help of Google Adwords Keyword Tool or semrush.com. These prove a great help in finding the keywords related to your topic. Not only this, these can even give information about what words or phrases your competitors are targeting to bring the traffic to their websites.

#2 Use all relevant keywords in your blog

It is essential to use the most relevant keywords in your industry for your blog. This will get them noticed by people reading your blog and, more importantly, help the search engine crawlers indexing your content to pick them up and make your content available on all kinds of searches related to those keywords.

It is not only the inclusion of keywords that is important, but also where you place them. Your keywords should figure in the title, headings and subheadings, introductory sentence and the concluding paragraph. They should also be included in the anchor text or hyperlink, title tags and meta descriptions. However, avoid keyword stuffing, as it is not only a great put off for readers, but may also attract penalty from Google. Place your keywords intelligently.

#3 Use keywords in photo captions

The pictures you upload on your blog should have a keyword-rich caption or brief description. Include keywords in the file name as well.

#4 Provide links to other blogs and articles

It is good etiquette to include a link to another blogger or article in your posts. This will help the reader get more information through the link that you have referenced. A positive outcome of doing so is the possibility of receiving a link back. If you provide good quality links, chances of your blog getting ranked higher in search engine results brightens manifold.

#5 Give option for subscribing to your blog

Giving your readers an opportunity to subscribe to your blog will help add to your list of regular readers. So, include prominently display Feed Subscription Buttons or RSS. Also, provide your readers a chance to subscribe to your blog through email. All these will help your blog readers get automatic notifications regarding your latest posts without them having to look for latest updates or new content.

#6 Promote your blog posts through social media

Small businesses utilize social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc., for connecting with current and potential customers. You too can use the same strategy to promote your blog content by placing it on these social media sites. This will gain your business even more exposure. If you consider posting on social media a chore, use free programs like Hootsuite. A couple of clicks is all it takes to post links to your blog on all your social media sites using this program. It also provides an opportunity to schedule your posts in advance.

#7 Make your blog mobile-friendly

In the current times of smartphones, where people are increasingly using search engines from their mobile phones, it is important to make your blog mobile-friendly. What’s more, Google favors mobile-friendly blogs over others, displaying mobile-friendly results first. One option is to use HubSpot that is automatically responsive to mobile phones.

Conclusion

Following these SEO tips will not only place your blog and posts in higher rankings in SERPS, but also increase web traffic and higher customer conversion rates. If you are unsure of how to best implement these SEO tactics and others like it, you can go in for a company offering web optimization services, such as OpenVine and others.