Search engine optimization (SEO) is an incredible tool for marketers. By optimizing web pages (including blog posts), you can make your website more visible to people who are using search engines to find your products or services. However, does blog content really help a website organically rank on search engines? Blogging helps improve SEO quality by positioning a website among the top-ranking websites and helping searchers get relevant answers to their queries. In fact, organic search engine optimization services in New York design innovative strategies that help optimize blog posts, increase brand awareness and improve the website’s overall ranking and visibility on search engines.
Does Blogging Help SEO?
Blogging can help connect with the target audiences and promote your products and services. Optimizing your blog posts with relevant keywords will help the search engines identify your website, drive traffic, and rank it high on the search engine results page (SERP). However, it is important to know the crucial ranking factors and how they affect a new blog. Ranking factors are the algorithms that determine how a page appears in search results. For instance, a website that has a lot of links and high quality content will rank higher than a site that has less content and fewer links. Therefore, regularly updating your blogs with high-quality content can give a huge boost to your overall SEO.
Blogging opens up a lot of opportunities to help you rank on search engines. The most important of all is that you can use blogs to deliver relevant answers to user queries.
Here discussed are some key ranking factors that can affect blog SEO –
- Dwell Time – Dwell time refers to the amount of time a reader spends on a page on your blog site. Right from the moment a visitor clicks on your site in the SERP, to the moment they exit the page is considered dwell time. Google looks at the amount of time a page spends on a user’s screen and decides how relevant that content is. This metric indirectly tells search engines like Google how valuable your content is to the reader. It makes sense that the longer they spend on the page, the more relevant it is to them. Pages with lots of dwell time are seen as more relevant to a searcher’s query and are thus ranked higher. There are two different ways in which dwell time affects blog SEO. Firstly, it helps Google figure out which pages are important and which ones are not. Secondly, it shows Google how engaged users are with the content. Longer dwell times indicate that users are spending time on the content and are very interested in it.
- Page Speed – The website load time plays a major role in determining how high your website will rank on Google. There are several factors that can affect page speed, including the server, the website’s size, and the plugins that are being used. For instance, images and videos take a long time to load. The longer that images take to load, the less likely it is that your page will rank. Therefore, it is vital to reduce the number of images on the website. Page speed can also be improved by optimizing and removing junk codes and unnecessary elements on the page. For instance, if the website is on WordPress, it is possible to use a caching plugin to speed up the load time. Take an inventory of your blog site plugins. Decide which plugins to include on the blog. In fact, plugins that affect the front-end of your website are a threat to page speed. In such cases, uninstall more of these plugins to increase the overall site speed. In addition to page speed, other factors like page size and web server’s response time are taken into consideration when ranking a website on Google.
- Mobile Responsiveness – It is estimated that more than half of Google’s search traffic in the United States comes from mobile devices. Mobile responsiveness refers to the ability of a website to display content on any device. The main goal of responsive design is to make a website work across various screen sizes, including smartphones. A mobile-friendly website makes it easy for users to access information easily. In addition, it makes it easy to navigate and searchable. A website which is not easy to navigate on mobile devices can use an SEO blog template. Using a template that is optimized for speed and accessibility makes a website relevant on mobile search.
- Index Date – A factor search engines use when determining what’s relevant and accurate is the index date. In simple terms, index time (also known as a web crawl date) is the time a website updates its content. Later, the page can be retrieved and displayed in the SERP when a user searches for keywords related to the indexed page. It is important to know that Google doesn’t crawl all of the web pages at once. Google crawls one page at a time. Therefore, it is essential to update your website’s index date whenever any specific changes are made to the content. The index date of a website page is an important factor that affects your blog SEO. However, it is possible to control your own index date by changing the date and time on the Word Press post. Once, the date and time on the index page is changed, it is possible to reload blog to see the new changes. It is possible to use the search feature of your blog to check if your new index date is correct.
- Recent Data – Another indirect ranking factor of SEO, recent data must be included in blog posts. Recent data provides visitors relevant and correct information which makes for a positive reader experience. For instance, when you include a link to a credible website that has original, up-to-date data, you are giving an indication to the search engines that the website is helpful and relevant to the readers. In addition, this type of data is in some way related to the content published. Over time, the readers will come to appreciate the content, and this can be confirmed using other metrics like increased time on page or lower bounce rate.
It’s not just about what you put in your blog post; it’s about the way you use the content to connect with your audience and help them find you.
Blogs are essential for a website as they provide free information about a business’ products and services, which in turn increases brand awareness. Optimizing blog SEO can have a huge impact on the success of your website. However, it is not just about what is included in the blog post; it is all about the way the content is used to connect with the audiences. Therefore, having a clear understanding about the important Google ranking factors can make or break the digital marketing strategy. A reliable search engine optimization company can help in optimizing blogs for SEO, and also provide quality content writing services for blog posting. Quality content is very effective in increasing the rankings of websites on various search engines.
