Health Coach Blogging – Using Your Blog For Wellness Marketing, Part 2

In Part 1 of Health Coach Blogging – Using Your Blog For Wellness Marketing, I discussed what to write about on your health coach blog.  In this article, I am going to cover how to format your blog posts for SEO.

Make sure to stay tuned for part 3 in a few weeks, where I will cover what to do with your blog posts after you have published your blog.

In part 1, you learned about long-tail keywords and why they are more beneficial for SEO (search engine optimization) than more competitive search terms.  Now that you have picked out the keyword you want to write about, how should you format your blog post to get maximum SEO benefit?

Don’t Over Optimize Your Post

Google is constantly updating its search algorithm and in many SEO circles, there have been lots of suggestions on how to optimize content for the web that has gotten people in trouble.  Things like keyword stuffing (overuse of your keywords), duplicate content (publishing the same article in multiple places), and other black-hat techniques will do you more harm than good in the long run.

Your main goal is still to build a tribe that knows, likes, and trusts you to bring them excellent content.  No amount of SEO optimization will ever take the place of delivering high-quality content.  Both your readers and the search engines will reward you.

Where To Put Your Keyword

Your keyword should be in the title of your post.  Make sure that the title is still relevant to your readers.  Ideally the “keyword phrase” will be in the same order in your title as your long-tail keyword.  Let’s use this post as an example.  The keyword I am using is Health Coach Blogging.  The keyword can be found in the title, the first and last paragraph of the post, the post description, and the ALT tag (health coach blog) for the image in the post.

In SEO terms, these are the META title and META description tags.  These are the sections of your post that the search engines use when showing your post online.  Already the post I did on “health coach blogging” 3 weeks ago is ranking #4 for this keyword.  Granted this is a low search term, but once you start getting a lot of posts ranking on page 1 for long-tail keywords, you will start seeing some better results from the search engines.

This is a LONG TERM strategy, and consistency is the key.  Don’t expect any 1 of your posts to get a ton of traffic, but if they are well optimized, you will continue to see traffic coming to these long-tail keyword posts over time.

If you use WordPress for your blog, you can set up the meta title and description using some sort of SEO plugin such as All-in-one SEO, Yoast’s WordPress SEO, and many themes have this function built-in.  My favorite themes are built using Thrive Themes and you can set this right in the post editor.

Use An Image

Images are crucial for your blog posts.  Pick 1 image and name it with some variation of your keyword, as well as setting the ALT tag.  The ALT tag is what Google uses to categorize pictures.  When you search for a keyword and click on images, the images that show up first are the ones that are optimized for that keyword.

In these days of social media, the image on your blog post will also make sharing your post on places like Facebook and Pinterest more effective.  People are busy these days and with the volume of data flowing through social media, you need some sort of image in order to grab people’s attention.

Summary

Part 1 of Health Coach Blogging – Using Your Blog For Wellness Marketing covered what to write about on your health coach blog.

Part 2 covered how to format your health coach blog posts for search engine optimization, including META tags, keywords and images.

Part 3 will cover the steps to take after you have published your blog.