If you’re not an SEO expert, then you can be forgiven for finding the task of optimising your dealer website somewhat intimidating. The best option is probably to get in expert involved – our in-house SEO specialists can create an SEO package that allows us to optimise and boost your website’s organic performance.
However, one element that you will probably still need to be involved with is blog writing. Even though the Bluesky package involves some blog writing, we find most dealers still want access to create their own articles. If you’re doing that, some basic SEO knowledge will help you produce articles that are much more likely to rank for relevant search terms.
Here are our key components of an SEO-friendly news article:
Not only do headlines help readers to understand the gist of your blog post “at a glance”, but they can also serve an important SEO purpose too. If you create a headline and tag it using H2 tags (see here for more information about heading tagging in HTML), then Google will read it in addition to the headline as a way of labelling the blog content.
For that reason, your headlines should always try to feature SEO keywords that are related to your article.
Alt tags are essentially a way of tagging your images so that search engines know what they are of. To add an alt tag to an image, you need to be in the HTML code of the article – but all you then have to do is type alt=”your SEO image label” within the image section.
Here’s an example: <img src="smiley.gif" alt="Smiley face" />
Whenever you write a blog post, you should try to keep a keyword in mind – for instance, in this blog we are focusing on SEO related keywords. A keyword such as “SEO-friendly blog post”, will have lots of other synonyms and expressions – someone else might Google “Blog posts that are good for SEO” for instance.
Your blog should therefore try and include variations on your target keyword. This way it looks even more relevant to Google search bots. It should also feature a strong level of text – one paragraph of text just isn’t likely to cut it.
If someone finds your way onto a blog post via a search engine search, you are doing very well (of course, a blog post can also just be used to boost overall site performance). If they do this though, you want to pass some of the SEO juice that they bring with them onto other relevant parts of the site.
To do this, you should “interlink” your content. If you reference a product (like we did in the first paragraph with SEO), then you should link through to the product page. If you talk about a location, link through. You shouldn’t over-egg the pudding and link every second word, but any relevant links should definitely be added!
Hopefully this helps you to write more exciting, search engine optimised blog posts that can not only communicate key dealership news, but also benefit your organic listings and help you keep the content on your website fresh and relevant.