SEO Hacks: How to get your blog read Blogging is a miracle for brand awareness and especially for SEO. An interesting topic or helpful insights and tips are the ultimate for a successful blog - one would think. But unfortunately, it's not. To make your blog marketable, you should optimize your posts for SEO before uploading them. That way, your readers will find it quickly and easily. We'll explain to you which simple hacks are important and give you the ultimate checklist so that your blog is SEO-ready.

It's nice if you like to write. But a good writing does not help you for your SEO. Even if you have a great topic that you really want to write about – research is key! Your Google ranking will thank you afterwards. Therefore, first find out how your blog is currently doing – free ranking tools can help you with this. The tool shows you for which keywords your URL has been found so far and how your current visibility in the Google ranking is. Especially important to know: With which terms do you already rank well and with which - for you important - terms are you possibly not associated and found at all?

To optimize your SEO strategy, you need to know and use your potential. Above all, this means finding the right topics for you and your target group. Why? Imagine you are looking for information about the functions of your new smart TV and a blog for beauty products provides you with a supposedly suitable article - would you trust this source? That's exactly how other Google users feel. So ask yourself the following questions:

1. What problem can I solve for my target audience?
2. What am I an expert in?
3. What keywords are relevant for your business?
4. When you have answered these questions for yourself you can think about a topic for your blog post.

Keywords are the keyword when it comes to search engine optimization. Keywords are key words in your text - they reflect what the user is looking for and are, so to speak, the topic of your text in one word. You can easily check the quality of a primary keyword - the main keyword of your article - with tools like the Google Keyword Planner. The lower the competition and the higher the search volume the better! Your secondary keywords provide Google with the necessary semantic context. It's best to analyze your primary keywords and pair them with appropriate secondary keywords - your construction kit for keyword sets.

No matter which keywords you choose - what is in the foreground for Google should also be in the foreground for you: user-friendliness. Therefore, always pay attention to the user's intention: If a user searches for your keyword, you should also provide him with exactly the information in your post that he wants to obtain with his search query. So always think about what your target group would Google if they wanted to read your blog post - and use this insight to determine your keyword.

Once you have determined the right keywords for your new blog post and tested its quality, you only need to check whether your chosen topic is also suitable for your blog. The most important question here is: Have I already covered this topic in my blog? If yes: Hands off! For an SEO fair blog, topics and keywords should not be repeated within your own blog - otherwise there is a risk that your own blog posts will have a negative effect on each other's ranking. Google practically asks itself the question: Which of the two posts is more relevant for my user? If you cannot assess this yourself and neglect the prohibition of this so-called duplicate content, you will be severely punished by Google. The solution: update your existing content – because Google loves topicality.

No content, no blog – therefore, the editing of your post is an important step of SEO optimization. To do this, you start with the so-called H1 headline: This only exists once in your text and contains your primary keyword - at best relatively at the beginning of the headline. In the subsequent teaser, you give the reader a glimpse of what to expect in the article – because the teaser is crucial in determining whether your reader continues reading or jumps straight off. You can structure your article with several H2 headlines - W-questions are particularly suitable here, as they let the reader know directly what to expect in the corresponding paragraph. The following applies to all headlines: Mark them accordingly in the code so that Google can recognize and read them as headlines. So that you don't lose your reader after the end of the article, make sure to include a call-to-action!

Before your post goes live, here are a few little tricks that will do your ranking good. They are easy to implement and very effective at the same time.

Internal and external links

It makes sense to include links in your blog text, which the reader can use to get more information about a certain keyword, for example - but the rule is: less is more. A backlink is like a recommendation and every time you link to another page that does not belong to you, you give away a part of your trust. So the sites you link to should be well chosen and trustworthy. At the same time, you gain trust when other sites link to your blog. Google & Co. use your backlink profile as an indicator to rank your site. The more high-quality backlinks link to your page, the more popular you appear to Google - and the higher your ranking. However, links can not only be set externally - from your page to another - but also internally to your page. At the end of a blog article, for example, it is very good to give the reader further opportunities to stay on your page by providing a link to other blog posts.

Customize the permalink

The permalink - the link that ultimately leads to your blog post - is often created automatically, but it is important that you devote a few seconds to it before uploading your blog post. You should modify the link to include your keywords - feel free to omit filler words and stick to the most important two to three words.

Adapt your images

You should not exclude your images from SEO optimization. Even before uploading the images, your most important keywords should be included in your image naming and then appear in the alternative text of your image. In fact, Google searches for search results not only in texts, but also in images and videos. For mobile optimization, also make sure that your images have 72dpi web resolution - because large images pull a lot of mobile data - Google penalizes this severely.

Set up SERP snippet

Last but not least is your SERP snippet - it is composed of URL, Meta Title and Meta Discription and is the small section that is displayed to your reader at the beginning of their search among many others. This short section is crucial to whether or not your reader clicks on your blog post - so it's hugely important to tailor it to your reader's interests. Your primary keyword should also appear in this title. In the metadiscription, you should make the reader feel like you have the answer to what they are looking for. Put yourself in the shoes of your target audience and think about exactly what would need to be there to get them to click on the post. Of course, the same applies here: Include keywords!