5 Useful tools and tips for writing SEO optimised blogs

When it comes to blog writing, there are a lot of things to keep in mind regarding SEO to make sure the blog is working as hard as possible for you. We thought we would run through a list of the tools and tips we have accumulated over time which help to make it that bit easier!

Yoast

Yoast is a website plugin that helps your SEO is optimised to a good standard throughout your website. We find this tool specifically useful for writing blogs. Yoast provides you with an analysis of your writing, ranking different areas of your copy using a red, amber and green traffic-light system. It identifies areas where your blogs need to be improved and gives you top-line feedback on how. After following the steps suggested by Yoast, such as including internal and external links, keyphrase density and meta description, your blog will achieve a green smiley face when it’s ready to be published. Yoast is a great tool for all your blog SEO needs.

Grammarly

Grammarly is a free* Chrome web extension that suggests spelling, punctuation and grammatical changes to your writing. It’s basically a free proofreader for any of your work, making it an extremely handy tool to have in your copywriting kit! Grammarly underlines any issues and then provides suggestions and improvements in your writing for quick and easy changes. For a more in-depth analysis of your writing, you can select the icon at the bottom of your page and Grammarly will display a ranking on correctness, clarity, engagement and delivery. What more could you need!

Internal and External Links

Did you know that backlinks are really important when building SEO for your website? Blogs are the perfect way to incorporate links into your website content. When planning and writing your blog, think about the opportunities to link internally, so to other areas within your own website, and also externally – to relevant resources. It’s important to consider where your links are placed and make sure your external links are opening in a new tab, you don’t want to take traffic away from your site!

Image Alt Attributes

Image alt attributes sometimes get forgotten, so here’s your friendly reminder to go back to that blog from last week, open up the image and get describing! Image alt attributes are used when an image cannot be displayed or viewed on your website, and helps to give a better understanding of the content that would be shown. Website visitors that are blind, visually impaired, or use a screen reader may rely on image alt attributes, so for accessibility purposes, you want to make sure your descriptions are as accurate as possible. Your image descriptions also help Google find and display relevant content in searches, helping with your SEO.

Header Tags

When loading a blog to a website, especially if it has been prepared on an external document such as Word, it can be easy to just copy, paste, publish and call it a day. Doing so can mean that certain details, such as header tags and formatting, are missed. Header tags are used in the same way that you would use headings and sub-headings in your writing, the difference here is that you are incorporating this into the actual website code. So next time you make a heading bold or underline that subheading, make sure you go into the text settings and change them from ‘paragraph’ to ‘H1’, ‘H2’ or ‘H3’and so on.

If you like what you’ve read and feel like you could do with a bit more marketing support, get in touch! Mzuri offers a free marketing consultation, so contact us today to see how we can help you.