In Collaboration With Click Consult.
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. I’ve been blogging for four years now and I’m still learning! Knowing how to apply proper SEO tactics to your blog means that it’s 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, I’m 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 don’t take seriously. It is important to have your website hosted 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. Let’s 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 I’m happy with them too, though. A permalink is the link after the slash in your web address, so a bad one would be “www.gemmalouise.co.uk/p345” – a good one, like this post for example, would be “www.gemmalouise.co.uk/five-ways-to-improve-your-blog-posts-for-seo”. 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. It’s 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 you’re 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 I’m 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. Don’t just link for the sake of it, always make sure it’s 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 they’re live just to check for spelling errors. It’s amazing what you can miss, especially when you’re 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 they’re 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 won’t be given a second look by search engines!
SEO Friendly Images
Something I’ve been doing for a while now (but not always done!) is make sure that my images are SEO friendly. There’s 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 I’m writing a post about photography tips, I’ll label each image “ten photography tips for bloggers” or something along those lines. I’ll 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 can’t 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 shouldn’t be a big issue but it’s 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.
