Seven basic tips for blog SEO
John Stevens discusses seven basic tips to optimize your blog SEO.
John Stevens discusses seven basic tips to optimize your blog SEO.
By now the advantages of blogging are undoubtedly well-established. Statistics show that:
However, if you don’t have an SEO strategy for your blog, you are most certainly missing out. Research shows that SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate, compared to a 1.7% close rate through outbound means.
In other words, it is not enough to blog. You need to make sure your blog ranks in the search engines. The following basic tips will help you optimize your blog for search engines:
Take a look at the screenshot below — from an article on the Writers in Charge website:
You’ll notice the section underlined in red? That’s breadcrumbs.
You can also see this implemented on all Search Engine Watch articles, including this one you are reading.
Using breadcrumbs has two main advantages:
Any article discussing basic blog SEO tips that doesn’t talk about content is incomplete. While Google has maintained a level of secrecy about factors it uses to rank websites, it has never shied away from emphasizing the importance of content. In fact, according to Google Search Quality Senior Strategist Andrey Lipattsev, content, links, and rankbrain are the three most important search ranking factors.
The main question, however, is this: what gives a blog post an advantage over others in the search engines. While Google has been very vague, SEO experts have some data based on analysis:
Taking the extra time required to add relevant, properly-tagged images to your blog post can seem frustrating, but it will be well worth it. It’s one of the easiest, most basic things you can do to help your content rank better.
According to Backlinko’s analysis of over one million articles, blog posts that contain at least one image significantly outperformed content without any images. That said, it doesn’t seem to matter much whether a piece of content has one or ten images: at the very least, make sure to include an image in all of your blog posts.
Links are undoubtedly one of the most important search engine ranking factors. In fact, the impact links play on search engine rankings is so significant that Backlinko’s research found that links influence the rankings of any content piece more than anything else.
However, a lot of attention is often paid to external links to the detriment of internal links. In a case study, Ninja Outreach explained that they were able to boost their search traffic by 40% simply by working on their internal linking.
Here are some tips:
Depending on the CMS you are using for your blog, you’re likely to be stuck with an SEO-unfriendly permalink structure. Permalinks are the web address used to link to your content.
For example, if you own the blog: howtoteachadog.com and publish an article titled “How To Teach a Dog to Catch,” the resulting URL structure could be this:
howtoteachadog.com/?p=100
Or this:
howtoteachadog.com/how-to-teach-a-dog-to-catch
In most cases many blogs are stuck with the first version — which gives no indication of what the article is about. The second structure, on the other hand, is more descriptive and will be more effective from an SEO perspective.
If you use WordPress, this article will show you how to change your blog permalink structure. If you use other CMSs, they most likely have an official tutorial on how to do this.
Plugins can give you a kind of superpower when it comes to your blog SEO. While you want to be careful with what plugins you install (in order to avoid clunking your site and making to slower), installing and using the following basic SEO plugins will give you an edge:
This is as basic as it gets. Google admits that links are one of the top three ranking factors it uses when ranking websites. Effective blog SEO is not possible without external links.
Here are some ideas to help you get backlinks to your blog: