The checklist for a good SEO referencing of your blog articles
Having a blog helps promote your brand awareness and showcase your company's expertise. But if it generates qualified traffic on your website and potential leads, it's even better! It is thanks to the implementation of a good SEO referencing that this is possible. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is “the art of positioning a site, a web page or an application in the first natural results of search engines”. In this article, we give you our advice to optimize the SEO referencing of your blog articles and to ensure that you generate maximum traffic and attract your prospects to your site.
Identify the right keywords to improve your SEO
One article = one goal = one main keyword
An article must target a main keyword and be optimized around this keyword. Of course, this article will also aim to position itself on the long tail and the secondary and derived words around your main keyword. So, it is particularly important to choose it well! In order to optimize your SEO for Cleaning Business, this main keyword must be present in 2 to 5% of all your text. It must be found everywhere in your text, whether in the introduction, in the body of it or in the conclusion or the opening of your article.
Your main keyword must imperatively be present in the title tag, in the URL and in the H1 tag. We will develop these points in more detail later in this article.
Tools to find your keywords
There are several tools available to you (free or paid) to help you determine your main keyword and its secondary derivative keywords.
For more information on these different tools such as Google AdWords, Ranxplorer, Google Trend or Google Suggest, do not hesitate to read our top 5 of the best keyword generators for your SEO.
Identify the semantic universe and the list of questions related to your keywords
For your SEO referencing to be optimized, remember to use the tools allowing you to identify the semantic universe and the list of questions related to your keywords in order to integrate them into your article. You will find these features in tools such as Ranxplorer or Answerthepublic.
Optimize your natural referencing: good practices!
Read the title
To improve your SEO, it is important to take care of your title tag since it is this title that will appear first in search engine results. This is the main line that people will click on to get to your article. This tag should include your main keyword and should be clear and concise. As a general rule, the title tag of a page should not exceed 512 pixels (50 to 70 characters).
Optimized URL
Search engines attach great importance to the URL addresses of web pages. Indeed, your prospects will be able to find you more easily if your URL is simple and clear. To do this, you have to optimize it, simply by keeping your domain name, followed by the keywords you have identified.
Semantic tags (Hn)
The Hn semantic tags (numbered from 1 to 6) allow you to structure the text of your article as well as to summarize the content of your paragraphs in order to highlight the most important ideas that you want to convey to your readers. These tags play an important role in SEO referencing since they allow you to highlight the keywords on which you have decided to position yourself.
We advise you to put a single H1 containing the main keyword that you have identified and which will allow you to evoke the subject of your article. This key word could be reused thereafter in certain Hn. Your H2 tags should contain secondary keywords and H3 tags should target related keywords to optimize your SEO.
Meta description
The Meta description tag appears in search engines, below your title tag and is an element of SEO that should not be overlooked. It gives a concise summary of the content that can be found on your page. Google does not take this tag into account in its algorithm to order the results, but it is what determines whether or not a user will click on your article. So don't neglect it! You must manage to make people want to read your article. This tag must therefore be unique and attractive in order to generate clicks on your URL. In general, the Meta description tag should not exceed 165 characters. However, since the beginning of 2018, the length of the Meta description has increased and is on average 230 characters.
Alt tag on images
Alt tags on images are used to indicate the content of an image to search engines. It is in this sense that these tags are a key point of your SEO, not to be neglected. This is why you need to work on your alt tags using the keywords related to the image you have decided to include in your article. Alt tags help optimize your SEO since these keywords will also be read by search engines and will give them details in order to interpret your content. These tags also allow you to be referenced in Google Images and increase traffic to your article and therefore improve your SEO. These are also the tags that will show up if your images don't load and can tell your readers what the image represents.
No duplicate content!
In order to improve your SEO Services, do not copy content from other sites, either in whole or just certain paragraphs of an article. This criterion may seem simple but it is not the least. Indeed, when Google detects that a site duplicates content, it no longer makes it appear in the search results. It would therefore be a shame to see your efforts to improve your SEO reduced to nothing for a few copied lines. Tools exist to check your content by comparing it to all the content offered on search engines, such as plagiarisma.net.
The other SEO criteria to respect for your blog
Item Size
In order to get a good SEO ranking, the size of your article is also important. Long articles are considered more complete and provide more information. However, it is useless to write a text of 3000 words if your content is not of quality.
So, from an SEO point of view if you want to have the best chance of positioning yourself on your main keyword and its secondary keywords, we advise you to favor articles from 800 words. On very competitive requests, do not be afraid to write texts of 1500 or even 2000 words!
Image size
If it is important to use images to illustrate your article, these should not be too heavy. Indeed, images that are too heavy could negatively impact your SEO referencing. Since Google has gone mobile-first, the loading time of your page has become a key factor for good SEO. Remember to reduce the size of your images so that they do not exceed 100kb. Tools are available to resize them such as resize image.
Internal linking
Internal networking consists of using articles from your own blog to link to your main pages or to other articles on your blog to optimize your blog's SEO. These internal links therefore make it possible to link several pages of the same website or blog. Thus, do not hesitate to fill your articles with links to other pages in order to optimize your internal links. However, we advise you not to include too many links on an article and to settle for only 2 or 3.
Outgoing links
We advise you to limit the number of outgoing links from your article to sites other than your own. Indeed, making a large number of external links reduces your "SEO juice". On the other hand, making one or two links from your article to institutional or government sites will support the legitimacy of your article with Internet users and with Google.
You now have all the keys in hand to optimize your SEO for your blog posts. It is important not to neglect any of the tips we have just given you so that your SEO strategy is a success and that your articles are positioned in an optimized way on Google. Once these are online and to maximize your traffic, promote your articles on your social networks. Do you want to know more about the best strategy to adopt to optimize the SEO of your blog? Contact us!