Your blog is one of the best tools you can have to promote your brand, distribute useful content, engage web users, and attract customers. It's not enough, however, to create content that is sure to be relevant, informative or entertaining to your audience and to post it on the blog — if you want to make it easier for the post to appear whenever someone types in a related search query on Google, the blog post has to be well optimized.

For any business in Arizona (AZ), SEO remains a crucial requirement for effective marketing, and your own venture must strive to get the maximum results out of blogging in order to boost your search ranking and drive more traffic. To this end, here are five simple yet highly results-driven tips for optimizing your blog posts and helping them reach a wider audience.

1. Write content well — and include the right keywords

First and foremost, your blog post has to be written for people. Just because you're maintaining a blog to promote your business doesn't mean that it has to be all about getting displayed on search engine results pages. Keep in mind that the blog has to be something that people will want to read, so make sure the writing is natural, the topics are relevant to your audience, and the value of the piece can't be gotten from another source.

With that said, to optimize the post, include one or two strategically placed keywords that you obtained by using tools like Google AdWords. You can incorporate them into the title and the body, but refrain from excessively stuffing the post to avoid putting off readers and getting penalized by Google.

2. Add the right images

To make your post more engaging, it helps to include a gorgeous, good quality photo that relates well to the text. This photo must have a filename, and this is where you can include a keyword that can help increase the post's searchability.

3. Create meta information

Although Moz has expressed that meta descriptions are not directly considered by search engines anymore when it comes to ranking pages, they remain a useful factor in encouraging web users to click an entry in search engine results pages.

The meta description is the short sentence that provides a brief yet compelling summary of what your blog post is about, so make sure to create an accurate description so that people will become interested and visit your page.

4. Provide links to other sites

It's good blogging etiquette to include links to sites that you used as references for the information to your blog, as well as other helpful and relevant sites. By linking to reputable pages, you also beef up the credibility of your post.

5. Make sharing easy

Social signals create a positive impact on organic search rankings so it's good practice to encourage readers to share your content on social media sites. You can do this by adding buttons that allow web users to share or endorse your content on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. If your post contains lots of great images, a Pinterest button is also an excellent idea.

With these basic tips, your blog posts gain a greater chance of being easily found and shared across the internet, which is good news all around for your business.