We all look at our blogs and want more, don’t we? On the daily I am trying to think of ways I can improve my blog’s online presence and increase my traffic. Today I want to share with you some simple SEO tips to improve your blog’s presence in search engines. You heard me – simple.
First, what is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. Now that’s out the way, here’s what it’s all about: SEO is all about increasing not only traffic to your blog, but the quality of that traffic; all via organic search results. There is so much to learn and understand about SEO which is why many of us may find it confusing and not quite know where to begin. So, here are some simple SEO tips to get you started.
Keyword Research
First, you need to know what keywords you want to target – keywords are the foundation of successful SEO. Brainstorm a list of keywords related to your blog and your content and take to Google to find more relevant keywords based on those you’ve brainstormed. For example, when you type into the search field in Google, suggestions often pop-up as you type, as well as a list at the bottom of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Use these as additional keywords.
Optimise Your Titles, URLs and Meta Descriptions
If you own a WordPress blog like me, I highly recommend the plugin Yoast SEO – I did a post on this SEO WordPress plugin, so be sure to check that out. This will help assist you in improving your page titles, URL and meta descriptions.
The key thing to remember about these three things, are that they are what is shown in search results; therefore, it’s what you need to optimise to one, rank well enough to show in search results and two, entice a user to click on your listing.
Ensure your keywords are in the title of your page, but not in a way where you’ve just plonked it there; it needs to read naturally. The same for your meta description too. Ideally, you want the keyword to be at the beginning of the title to improve your ranking but, again, only do this if it’ll read natural.
IMPROVE YOUR SITE’S LOADING TIME
Ever gone on a website which is taking more than 3 seconds to load? Doesn’t sound a long time, but when it comes to a web page, the page speed is crucial. Google’s PageSpeed tools are extremely useful to get on top of this, so I highly recommended checking these out. One of the biggest yet easiest changes you can make to improve your page speed is reducing the size of your images. It’s easier to just upload an image on to your blog as is, but by simply resizing and compressing the image, you’ll be doing your site (and SEO efforts) a big favour.
Mobile Friendly Blog
Nowadays, if your website isn’t responsive and therefore isn’t mobile-friendly, search results don’t want anything to do with you for mobile users. Especially now Google has introduced their ‘mobile-first index’, used for indexing mobile websites. If you’re not mobile-friendly, you won’t be part of this mobile index, which means you’re losing out on lots of potential traffic. These days, a decent % of your users are visiting your site via mobile or tablet devices, so you need to ensure your blog adapts to this.
Optimise Your Images
Other than ensuring they’re resized to help improve your page speed, ensuring all your images have alt text is essential. Alt text is also known as ‘alt attributes’ or ‘alt descriptions’, and they are used to describe the appearance and function of an image. Having this in place helps search engine crawlers better understand an image, therefore helping them to index an image properly. There’s much more to learn on this topic, so I put together a post on how to optimise your images which goes in more depth.
Share your simple SEO tips in the comments below!
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