Do you know how to optimise your blog posts to make them more search engine friendly? By providing fresh, relevant content and performing basic blog post optimisation, you can take advantage of the many benefits blogging offers. Kelly Thomas Mango of Open Vine Solutions shares six easy search engine optimisation (SEO) tips to help get your blog noticed. Read on!

1. Do your research

Keyword research is essential for on page optimisation. Chances are you are naturally including keywords without realizing it simply by providing valuable content on a topic. However, there are a variety of tools and techniques for finding related keywords relevant to your blog post that you may not have considered. The Google Adwords Keyword Tool and semrush.com both offer great tools that allow you to find keywords related to your topic and even spy on your competition to see what words and phrases they are targeting to bring traffic to their sites.

2. Utilise keywords throughout your post

Once you have targeted a couple of valuable, relevant keywords, it is important to place them where they will have the most impact. Try to include them in the title, headings and subheadings, introductory sentence, concluding paragraph, anchor text (text you hyperlink to other related pages on your site), as well as title tags and meta descriptions.

A word of caution: Don’t engage in keyword stuffing, which is the act of filling your content with so many keywords that it becomes difficult to read. Not only will this irritate your blog followers, it will also get you penalised by Google. A couple of strategically placed keywords will do the trick.

3. Optimise your images

Whenever you upload a photo to your blog, be sure to include keywords in the file name and fill out the alternate text field with a brief, keyword rich description of the photo.

4. Reference others with links

When you mention another blogger or article in your blog post, include a link to the information you are referencing. Not only it is a good blogging etiquette, you may also get lucky and receive a link back. Quality links are a valuable commodity for any site looking to rank higher in search engine results pages.

5. Give readers the opportunity to subscribe to your blog

Include prominently placed ‘Feed Subscription Buttons’ and offer viewers the ability to subscribe to your posts via email when possible. This allows your blog followers to have instant notification of your latest posts without having to periodically check your site for new content.

6. Use social media to broaden the reach of your blog posts

As a small business, you may be utilising Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or other social media sites to create connections with potential and current customers. Why not promote your blog content on these sites for even more web exposure? Free programs like Hootsuite make it easy to post links to your latest blog post on all of your social media sites with just a couple of clicks. You can even schedule your posts ahead of time!