Optimising your blog posts helps to ensure your posts have the best chance of being found, read and shared by your target audience while improving your page’s ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Search engine optimisation (SEO) may sound complicated to beginners, however, grasping the basics of SEO is quite simple and easy to put into practice. Here are a few tips to improve your blog posts performance:

Keywords
Keywords are the words and/or phrases readers will search for to find information on specific topics. Aim to use keywords throughout your blog posts without compromising user readability. Although, adding relevant keywords to your text is helpful; it is more important to focus on the quality of the content rather than the targeted keywords. Adding too many keywords in an attempt to improve SEO is considered “keyword stuffing,” which will actually lower your rankings.

URL
URLs must be clear, simple and relevant. It is preferable to use a short URL that conveys all the necessary information about your content. SEO friendly URLs are typically between 50-80 characters and include your targeted keyword phrase.

Headline
The headline is the first point of attraction for the reader, if it isn’t appealing it will not generate a click. A headline needs to be concise, relevant and ideally keyword-optimised. Although it is no longer necessary to use specific keywords in your title, it may be useful to include your main keyword phrase to provide readers with more context of the topic you are covering.