It’s no longer a secret that blogging is one of the most important features on your website if your goal is to improve SEO, increase conversion rates, and generate leads.
97 Display manages hundreds of fitness websites globally, and our most successful clients have a few things in common, one of which is that they all blog.
Blogging doesn’t have to be scary. Many of our clients aren’t professional writers and fear that the content they produce won’t be helpful or that people simply won’t read it. Ultimately they fear wasting their time over something that may not generate any immediate results. But the fact is that blogging can be used for technical and SEO benefits… not just for audience education. This means that even if no one ever reads your blog it can still be beneficial to your website! Let’s discover 3 ways to supercharge your blog for SEO:
1. Backlinks & Sitelinks
Your blog is one of the most natural ways to include large numbers of backlinks & sitelinks on your website.
Backlinks: hyperlinks on your website to other URLS (such as your social media business profiles)
Sitelinks: Hyperlinks on your page to other pages on your website (such as “click here to view our new schedule)
Backlinks and Sitelinks are beneficial to your SEO because it communicates to Google specific keywords that your URL is talking about. The more backlinks & sitelinks, the more confident search engines are about the content on your site and the more likely you will rank higher in search engines.
One of my favorite way to naturally include backlinks on your blog is to end EVERY blog post with this:
“Learn more at our social media channels!
Timothy’s Fitness Facebook Page
Timothy’s Fitness Twitter Page
Timothy’s Fitness Google+ Page”
Where each of the lines hyperlink directly to the respective social media page.
BUT DON’T STOP THERE!
Next: Go to each other the social media channels and link back to that specific blog post.
● Facebook: New blog post! Learn more about our group training spring schedule:
www.fitnesstimothy.com/blog/group-training-spring-schedule
● Twitter: New blog post! Learn more about our group training spring schedule:
www.fitnesstimothy.com/blog/group-training-spring-schedule
● Google+: New blog post! Learn more about our group training spring schedule:
www.fitnesstimothy.com/blog/group-training-spring-schedule
This will create a web of links back and forth between your blog and your social media channels.
Get into the habit of doing this! Over time you’ll build a strong web of backlinks between your website URL and your social media channels which will clearly communicate to search engines the content and services of your website…. which is essential for top rankings!
2. Be Smart With Your Blog Titles
Your blog title is the most important aspect of your blog post. It is what tells search engines what your blog is about and it has the most SEO influence.
Avoid titles like:
“Ten Fat Burning Tips for January”
For a fitness business website, this title has no strategic keywords in place. It has no location keywords, and no service keywords. While it may read nicely it’s missing out on the natural opportunity to plug more strategic keywords on your website as titles!
Here is an example of an SEO friendly alternative:
“Beat the Cold: Denver’s Best Fitness Program Tips for Burning Fat this January”
This title communicates the same content but includes valuable keywords such as “Denver” and “Fitness Program.” This is especially helpful for small towns and surrounding suburbs that you want to rank in. Remember, you can always go back in time to old blog posts and update titles with these keywords!
3. Include Video & Image Tags. Videos and images will increase user engagement and improve the likelihood that your readers will actually read your blogs.
Just placing images & videos on your sites without tagging them, however, does nothing for your SEO.
An image is a perfect place to place otherwise awkward keywords in a perfectly “Google-friendly” way. Anytime you upload and image to your blog, simply name it something keyword rich- like “Denver Personal Training and Fitness Classes” EVEN if the picture is something completely unrelated.
Search engines will crawl your blog, however they can’t see your images – they can only see your description of the image. By naming your image something keyword rich you’re telling search engines that this image has to do with your specific keywords. This is HUGE! Any image or video gives you an opportunity to plug as many keywords as you can into the description or title of that image.
Since your website visitors most likely won’t see the title of your image, you won’t have to worry about how readable your keywords are- just make sure they are there!
Learn more tips for improving your website performance at www.97display.com!
Authored By:
Timothy Sarazen – Director of Operations at 97 Display.
97 Display Creates Websites & Lead Generating Campaigns for Fitness Business. Learn if 97 Display can help your fitness website! Visit www.97display.com.