Right optimization is vital to succeeding in content marketing and SEO. However, familiarization with the techniques of optimizing blog posts can be quite confusing for marketers. They want to do things on their own because so many types of tips and advice are floating all around that one cannot make out, which would be useful and which one to avoid. If you do not want to hire an SEO expert from some SEO company like https://socialmarketway.com/seo-nyc, then you must depend on some actionable tips about optimizing blog posts discussed in this article for your DIY optimization.

Choose the topic with some thought

You must create exciting and relevant content for your target audience that conveys value. Create content for humans first because when the audience likes the content, it sends out positive signals to search engines that, too, start realizing its worth. You must please search engines with the content by first making it likable for the audience because, for search engines, user experience is the last word to evaluate content quality.

Choose the topic of content by understanding what the audience is interested in and what they want to know about. The better you know the audience and their expectations easier; it will be to select the topic of content that the audience would appreciate. Once you know the areas of interest of the audience, you can create content on some remarkable topic that the audience might not have even thought of but would be highly pleased with it. The approach would be somewhat like search engines that consider first what users want. After selecting the topic, you can delve into other areas of optimization, like what keywords to target.

Choosing keywords

Before you start writing blog posts, you must be ready with a master list of keywords. It will provide an exhaustive list of all possible keywords and phrases related to your products and or services. To identify the keywords, start thinking from the customer's perspectives - which kinds of words they would likely use for searching the products or services. These words or terms would naturally be most relevant to your business. Since you are the master of your business, you only know best how others would approach your business when looking for some products or services, and brainstorming sessions are best to identify the most relevant keywords. There is no need to use any tools to identify keywords at this stage because it can distract you from focusing on the most pertinent ideas and lead to confusion.

A tool like Google Keyword Planner is useful to check the numbers only when you have the master list of keywords ready. The free tool can provide accurate data about the actual worth of the keywords that you have chosen. You will get an idea about the volume of searches that the keywords attract and the kind of competition that it faces for rankings. The data will help to improve upon the initial ideas that you had gathered on your own. To keep away from wild suggestions generated by the tool, focus on the relevance of keywords. Finally, you can sort the list of keywords according to its value and relevance.

A blend of hot topic and highly relevant keyword or phrase will be most useful to win over users and do well in technical SEO too.

How to use keywords

Pick the most relevant term or keyword from the final list; it should be the main keyword for the topic. This is the most critical step in optimizing blog posts, and also, you must take note of related keywords that fit well within the topic. The associated keywords, though secondary, are quite crucial for optimization as it helps to cover the wider context of searches. Create the blog post by developing the topic around the main keyword. Make sure that you use the primary keyword several times in the article by spreading it across throughout the article in a natural way so that it does not appear to be repetitive. Take care to intersperse the secondary keywords in the article too. However, do not overdo it and maintain keyword density between 1% and 3%. Spread out the main keyword to avoid stuffing in any particular section of the article.

While writing the content, keep the focus on users and write it naturally by avoiding writing for the sake of inserting the keywords only. Proof-read the text to make it free from grammatical and spelling errors and divide the article into small sections and leave spaces for inserting images to create some key spots. Finally, add the right titles and subheadings to enhance the potential of the post.

Linking your post

Now that you are ready with the post, you must focus on linking, which is vital for its visibility that helps to expand the popularity of the post. Internal linking ensures a smooth transition between the pages across the website and the content, which allows search engines to track the links to crawl the site smoothly for effective indexing. Search engines also track external links that point to the relevance of content and provide access to additional sources of information that enhance the value of content.

Quality and relevance are the keys to link building. Link quality prevails upon relevance because links obtained from poor quality websites do not have any value for search engines that consider it as a poor source of information. By looking at the traffic volume of sites, you get some idea about its quality to decide if you can target it for linking.

Focus on sharing content

How you share the content contributes to its popularity, and you can link the new post to other previously published posts that are relevant to increase its reach. You can also link your post from social media pages to generate more traffic. Linking the new post to related guest posts is another way of expanding the reach.

After achieving the basis of optimization discussed here, you can take the next step of hiring professionals to raise your game.