I have a little secret for you. The blog post that you’re reading right now is just as much to help my search engine rankings as it is to help you! Almost every time I post a blog, they’re search engine optimized blog posts. After all, if I’m going to spend a couple of weeks writing these, I want them to provide value on multiple levels!

In your wedding business, you should be blogging consistently. More frequently is better for SEO purposes as you’re adding more content on your site that can be crawled by Google. I blog weekly but my website is still relatively new and it’s an online business. For you, if you can do 12 blogs per year to start (1 per month) then you’ll start to improve those SEO rankings.

In this blog we’ll be looking at how to optimize your blog posts through 6 areas of your blog.

Keyword Research for Search Engine Optimized Blog Posts

Before you even begin optimizing your blog post, you need to know what people are typically searching for to find that blog! Head over to Google Keyword Planner or Ubersuggest and put in some search terms that are related to your blog topic. That way you can see the words your audience is using to find the answer they’re looking for. I like to use the example of wedding florists. It can be tempting to refer to yourself as a floral designer but the majority of people are searching for wedding florist or wedding flowers. Does this mean you can’t refer to yourself as a floral designer? Absolutely not! This is a fantastic branding play. You can still include this term on your website but areas where SEO is most important, stick with what people are searching for.

If you’re not sure what to write about, we have a whole blog post on how to come up with blog ideas for your wedding business.

Title Tags

Your Page Title is one of the most important areas to put the primary keyword for your blog. It is actually possible to have a SEO Title and a regular Blog Title on your blog post. This way you can add keywords into your SEO Title and change it up slightly to sound better for attracting your reader. When it comes to your SEO Title, you can choose to include your business name which will also help you rank for your own business name. It may be tempting to make this full of keywords but you only have 600 pixels to play with, so use it wisely.

We use the Moz Title Tag checker to test our Title Tag lengths for our search engine optimized blog posts.

Meta Description

Your Meta Description is the little snippet that shows up on your search engine result underneath the title tag. This is another prime spot for that primary keyword and other related keywords. As this is going to a blog post, it’s also a place to entice people to click on that result, so don’t fill it with unnatural sounding keywords as it’ll impact your SEO if no one clicks!

Most of the time Google will just pull the intro paragraph into the Meta Description so you’ll likely want to overwrite this and put in your own Meta Description. Again, there is a length limit of 920 pixels so we use a length checker like this.

Using Headings in Search Engine Optimized Blog Posts

Your headings also tell Google that they’re important elements within your blog. It’s giving Google a better idea of the content within that blog itself. So when writing blogs make sure you’re adding in headings every 300 words.

Those heading should also contain…. You guessed it… keywords! Now you may have noticed that not every title in this blog you’re reading contains keywords. Scroll down and see if you can spot the one that does! This is because you still want the blog to read well and having the same keyword too frequently, flags the blog as sounding “spammy”.

Not all headings are weighted the same. For your main headings they should be Heading 2 which will be an option on your blog platform. For smaller headings, use heading 3 & 4. Google knows these are not as important but they make your blog easier to read for the reader.

Image Alt Tags

Did you know the Google crawlers can’t see images? They rely on the information that you are putting in to the image to tell them what that image is about. You can use the image alt text to include keywords that relate to the image and your blog.

Be careful to make these accurate to those images, those who are visually impaired also use this alt text to read your blogs! If you’re interested in learning more about making your blog accessible to those who are visually impaired, here’s a great blog post on that!

Links

When writing you blog posts you should be linking to other places within your website as well as relevant external blogs. As a wedding professional, your outbound links could go to other vendors that you have worked with that you may mention in the blog. Avoid linking to competitors who are also trying to rank for the same keywords as you.

Yoast SEO for Search Engine Optimized Blog Posts

My most favourite tool is the Yoast SEO plugin. However, please note that this is only available for WordPress websites. This plugin will tell you all the things I’ve mentioned above and how your blog post is performing in each of those categories. If you’re on WordPress, download it today!