Danie’s Corner : SEO For Bloggers – How To Improve Your Blog’s SEO

 

SEO For Bloggers: How To Improve Your Blog’s SEO

SEO is something you’ve probably heard before or not and you’re probably taking advantage of it already or not. But SEO is short for search engine optimization and if you have a blog or a website, an online store or anything that you do online, you want people to be able to land on your blog, land on your website when they search for things on Google or any of the other search engines such as bing, yahoo, etc.

Today, people also your potential readers are always on the internet searching for things be it information, stuff to buy, reviews before buying something, tips, tutorials, news and other good stuff. If your blog is optimized for search engines, it means the search engines are going to be able to direct people to your blog when people search for things similar to your topic or niche.

To improve your blog’s SEO, there are a couple of basic things that you can do and to be honest, some bloggers ignore SEO altogether not for the fact that they do not find it important but because they just don’t know the basic stuff to do. And I’m not saying that if you do these things, then your blog is going to automatically appear on the 1st page of google but these are some of the beasic steps to get there and you might even land on the second or third page immediately if you follow these basics

1. Keywords – Research for keywords on whatever topic you want to write on before you use it. Keywords are the phrases that a potential reader would type into the search bar. For example “How to lay your edges”. The keyword there is “lay your edges”. You always want to put yourself in the shoes of the reader, how will this person search for what I’m about to write on? And take those keywords and use them richly in your title, in the body of your post, in your images, so that google can crawl and see such information on your blog and direct traffic there.

How to find relevant keywords?

• By using some keyword tools, for example, MOZ Keyword Explorer is a paid tool but it allows you 2 keyword searches a day for free, Google AdWords is another tool to check the popularity of keywords and there are others.
• If you have coined out your keyword and want to know if it’s popular, you can type and search for it yourself and see the number of results it has.
• When searching for anything, Google starts to leave suggestions in a drop down. those are hints of the kind of queries people are searching for around that topic.

2. Optimize Your Images for SEO – Optimizing your images can be very powerful because sometimes, people search from Google under the images tab. We all need to stop the habit of labelling images with something like Image_008992 or Photo_208938, even if those are the default labels, always take the time to rename your images with the keywords of your blog post topic before uploading them. After uploading, populate the alt tag, the properties (if you’re using blogger)with these keywords. I’ve learnt recently that captioning your images help to improve your SEO and overall reader experience so use keywords to caption your images properly and wisely. Also read: How to Have Nice Blog Photos Without a Professional Camera

3. Change Up The Permalink – The permalink is just the link structure that you can see up in the address bar and you can edit it in your dashboard only before publishing not after and here’s why –

When your post is published, ping send to search engines, web directories and they start crawling your updated content and RSS Feed technology update that post in your in different feed readers of your subscribers. When you change your article’s URL then RSS Feed again publishes the same content so, it will show the same post twice and also search engines might crawl your article’s previous link so, when people click on that previously indexed links which you changed, the visitors will bounce to 404 NOT FOUND error page.

So reduce your permalink to just 3 or 4 keywords and eliminate the words like ‘the’, ‘a’, ‘of’ and leave just the keywords themselves.

4. Optimize The Description with just a summary of the post but let it be rich in relevant keywords.

5. Create Backlinks To Your Blog – a backlink is a link from another website to your own blog and this helps to boost your own blog’s ranking. One way to do this yourself is to leave comments on other high-ranking blogs and websites with links back to your own posts and when someone clicks on it then that’s backlinking. Another way is to do guest posting on other high-ranking sites and leave a link back to your own blog or if you have built relationships with other bloggers and then they might promote and link to you if it’s relevant.  (Also read: How To Correctly Approach Another Blogger For A Collaboration)

6. Submit your URL to Search Engines –  Submit your blog’s URL to Google and other search engines. This is a way of saying “my blog exists, come and crawl it”. Just google “Submit URL to search engines” and take it from there.

7. Link to your site from top social sites – Social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube etc already have some of the highest page ranks. You can also boost your page rank by linking from these sites to your blog. Also read: How To Use Facebook to Drive Massive Traffic To Your Blog

8. Yoast Plugin for WordPress – If you are a WordPress user, you can use the Yoast plugin to help you search optimise your content better.

9. Mobile Friendly Blog – Research shows that Google displays mobile-friendly results first so make sure your theme is mobile responsive.

10. Link Internally Within Your Blog – Always link to other pages within your blog, like previous blog posts that are related to what you’re writing about, this shows google that your posts are valid and relvant and if you can’t find any relationship between posts. You can say something like Also read … or You may also like … and link to the posts.

11. Use Google’s Search Console – This is something I recently started using and I really like. It helps you analyse the clicks that come from google searches to your blog, you can go HERE, sign up, verify your domain and few hours after that, you’ll be able to see the traffic coming to your blog from Google analysed.

So those are some basic SEO tips for bloggers. With Google Analytics, you can actually see what percentage of your traffic coming from search engines so this will help you know what posts are doing well on the search engines and help analyze your traffic. Comment below which of these tips you currently use and which ones you are going to start employing.Thanks for reading and happy blogging!

 

Written by: Daniella Bature