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As a full time blogger, I know how important SEO is when it comes to running a blog. It can all be a bit of a minefield but with a bit of research, practice, and help along the way you manage to figure out what works for you and your blog. Iβve been blogging for four years now and Iβm still learning! Knowing how to apply proper SEO tactics to your blog means that itβs more likely to attract traffic, appear on the first page of google search and keep the traffic constant so that it flows nicely. Today I wanted to share a few tips and tricks on improving your blog posts for SEO purposes. For reference, Iβm with WordPress so a few of these tips may only be applicable if you use it also.
Step One: Use A Fast Web Hosting Provider
This is a crucial step that a lot of blog owners donβt take seriously. It is important to have yourΒ website hostedΒ on servers that will deliver your blog reliably & fast to your readers. Remember, the servers where your website is hosted are a piece of physical hardware that are placed somewhere in a building & in a specific country. Letβs say you have a blog catered to an Italian audience, your website will be loaded much faster for people from Italy if your web hosting servers are in Italy. There are content distribution networks that tackle this problem better if you are looking for a global audience, but that also comes with additional expenses.
SEO Tip: Setting Your Permalinks
In WordPress, my permalinks set automatically to coincide with the title of my posts. I always like to check them to make sure Iβm happy with them too, though. A permalink is the link after the slash in your web address, so a bad one would be βwww.gemmalouise.co.uk/p345β β a good one, like this post for example, would be βwww.gemmalouise.co.uk/five-ways-to-improve-your-blog-posts-for-seoβ. It makes it easier for the readers and also gets picked up better by search engines.
SEO Tip: Link Back To Your Own Posts
Linking back to your own posts is such a game changer, when trying to improve my DA (domain authority) I found this worked the best by far. Itβs really simple to do, when writing new blog posts, just mention older posts that are either on similar topics, or have a similarity to what youβre writing about. For example, if I write a photography tips post, I might link back to an older one I wrote a couple of years ago as a reference to how my style has changed. Or if Iβm writing a post on travelling somewhere and I mention using my new camera, I might link to the blog post I did where I reviewed the camera in-depth. Donβt just link for the sake of it, always make sure itβs of relevance to your post otherwise you could be penalised by google.
Remember To Produce Quality Content
I always triple check my blog posts before publishing, and I usually read them again a couple more times after theyβre live just to check for spelling errors. Itβs amazing what you can miss, especially when youβre writing a lot of content. Keeping your posts to the best quality they can be is definitely a huge contribution to SEO. Not just making sure theyβre free of grammatical errors either, but high quality and engaging content in general. Keep them quite in-depth posts too, short, one paragraph blog posts wonβt be given a second look by search engines!
SEO Friendly Images
Something Iβve been doing for a while now (but not always done!) is make sure that my images are SEO friendly. Thereβs quite a lot to this so it takes a bit of getting used to in order to get into the routine of doing it. The first thing is labelling each image with something related to the blog title or topic. So if Iβm writing a post about photography tips, Iβll label each image βten photography tips for bloggersβ or something along those lines. Iβll usually use the same title and number each one. After uploading them to wordpress, I give each photo a caption (again, usually the same one) and I also add ALT text to them all. ALT text helps search engines understand what the image is about, and is helpful incase images on a page canβt be found. They should be descriptive but also kept quite brief. I usually just write keywords that are related to my blog post and what the post is about.
SEO Tip: Utilise Keywords
Placing keywords well within your blog post and the title is really valuable for getting your content indexed by engine crawlers. Look at the title of your post, the introduction, the anchor text for any links you place within the content, as well as the concluding paragraph. If you write quite well anyway this shouldnβt be a big issue but itβs definitely something to think about. According to Safaridigital Newcastle, the most important consideration when doing keyword research for SEO is to consider intent and to properly understand what people will search for when wanting to read about this specific topic, use relevant keywords and place them carefully.
If you still struggle with getting your head around SEO, but want to make sure all your posts are as search engine friendly as they can be, you can always use an SEO agency to help you out.
