Blogs can be a great part of your SEO content strategy. Optimizing your company blog can be a great way to not just improve SEO, but also increase cost effectiveness of your digital and social marketing. 

Writing an effective blog is a combination of both good writing skills and clever SEO tactics. SEO is an inexpensive and gradual process that can deliver great results over time—but it is time consuming to get right.  It also helps enormously to have an editorial calendar that commits you to feeding blog content into your website on a regular basis.

While many view paid marketing as a quick and easy way to drive traffic without a large time investment, once the spending stops, so does the traffic. SEO can be much more cost-effective in the long-term.  Optimizing your company blog or article to rank on Google search results is not as complicated as one might think. The key thing to remember is that SEO friendliness and blog readability go hand in hand and reinforce each other.

Tips for creating an SEO optimized blog post or article:

Start by carefully defining the focus keyword and other keywords that you most want to ensure appear on search results. Optimization and structuring your text go together: help the reader understand the goal of the article or blog post by populating the blog title, heading and introduction sentence. At the same time, keep in mind that using your focus keyword too often can damage the readability of your text.

Here are some tips for optimizing your company blog:

1. Define a focus keyword by defining the target audience and what they are likely to search for.
2. Add focus keywords in areas such as page title, heading titles, URL, image tags and meta-description.
3. Optimize your images by using your focus keyword as the title of the image to help both users and search engines understand what the image is about.
4. Optimize blog length, remembering this requires a minimum of 300 keywords to be appreciated by search engines.
5. Keyword density: Repeat your focus keyword 3 to 5 times to increase keyword density.
6. Syndicate your blog via Social Channels.
7. Optimize your blog page with user-responsive design, sub-two-second blog page load time.

Content is the lifeblood of successful SEO. The key thing to remember is that SEO is not a one-time set-and-forget process. To have an effective content strategy, think about developing an editorial calendar to feed content into your website on a regular basis. If done well, SEO can have a long lasting, sustainable positive impact on your website—and your business.