10 SEO Tips for Bloggers

As a blogger, SEO  is one of the most intimidating aspects of managing a website. For one, it feels like everyone talks about it like the be all and end all of running a successful online site, and apparently they’re speaking some unknown foreign language throwing around terms that any uninitiated webmaster or blogger would find confusing! It took me a number of years researching the subject to really understand what SEO was all about, and once I understood all the technical terminology and elements involved, it ended up being much less complicated than I once feared. Furthermore, I discovered that as my blogging skills increased, I was naturally incorporating aspects of SEO in my posts without even realizing it! So, you may already implement certain rules of SEO in your current blog without even knowing it, which I hope is something of a relief to you, as I know it was to me! So, I thought it would be helpful if I put together a post on the subject of SEO, demystifying the term and giving you 10 important tips for bloggers to use to better implement SEO into their sites!

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s essentially the process by which you affect the visibility of a website or webpage in organic (aka unpaid) search results. As a blogger, search engines like Google and Yahoo are a major source of traffic to your site. After all, when you first start out with a blog and don’t yet have a large following or significant web presence, you will begin to get readers and an audience via search engines. Someone out there on the web is searching for something, an answer to a question, a product review, an opinion piece on their favorite show, and they come across your blog via the search results. Obviously, if you have ever done a simple google search before, you know that a single search can yield hundreds of pages of results, and your goal, through using SEO techniques, is to get your relevant information higher up on the search results list to increase the chances of your content being seen and clicked on, bringing traffic to your blog!

Why SEO is important?

SEO is important because there are certain things you can do to make sure that your blog posts get seen by more people who are searching for content! You really don’t have to know any coding or have any computer science skills to make sure you are implementing some of the most important techniques. If you have been running a blog for a little while, you probably already have the skills necessary to take advantage of SEO!

10 SEO Tips for Bloggers!

1. Focus on creating high quality content that people are searching for.

This one may seem like a no-brainer to any serious blogger, but you’d be surprised how many blogs and sites create underwhelming content. If you want your content to be seen, you need to create interesting content that people would be willing to spend time experiencing. It also helps if you are creating content that falls in line with what people are searching for. For example, many people use search engines to find answers to questions or to solve problems in their own lives. If you write informational content that helps to answer common questions and issues that may be effecting large groups of people, it is more likely that people will find your content, enjoy it and want to become a regular reader!

2. Writer longer blog posts.

Once upon a time, there was a specific word count that was necessary for webpages to boost their visibility in search, and to some extent, there is still a rule of thumb out there that you should make sure each page of your site contains at least 500 words. However, newer SEO stipulations explain that longer blog posts, in general, do much better in search than shorter ones. I realize this is a little bit of a grey area, but the point is, whenever possible, write longer blog posts. Take the extra time to create a little more content, add a few more points to your article, whatever you need to do to make it longer, that will help when it comes to SEO!

3. Use clever and descriptive titles for your posts.

This is one of those common sense rules of SEO. When you are titling your blog post make sure it adequately describes the content of the post. Furthermore, I always believe it’s best if you create a more clever headline that may include a play on words, alliteration or a numbered list (ex. 10 Ways to Clean Wine Stains).

4. Use images as often as possible throughout your posts.

Image search results are just as important as text search results and pictures do so much to improve the content of a post. Not only do pictures illustrate the content of a post, but they are help to develop the aesthetic appeal of your site. I know when I am searching online, I often give preference to links with images than text alone, even when the text is relevant to my search. A picture is worth 1,000, so use them as much as you can in your blog posts!

5. Make sure to name your images descriptively and also include alt text. 

To ensure that your pictures show up in relevant search results, make sure to give your images descriptive names. Instead of IMG_123, give your image a name that explains what people are looking at, that way you increase the likelihood of your images being seen during search. Now, as far as alt text goes (alt text = alternate text), this is an option that you may see in your blog’s content management system when you go to upload new media to a blog post. The alternate text is simply a spot for an additional description that may be more matter of fact than the name of the file. Whenever possible, make sure to add alt text to your images. It doesn’t show up on screen when you publish a post, but it does help boost your images in search.

6. Use descriptive categories and tags for your posts and make sure your permalink are structured by category and blog post title (not by date!)

When you are writing your blog post, you have the option to add categories and tags to your post that help to give a bit of extra description and organization to the content. Make use of both of these features by assigning your post to a category that will act as a means of sorting your post by content, and tags that will help identify key words or terms that describe your post. Make sure to use logical, easy to understand categories, instead of personalized terms that may only make sense to you or frequent readers. For example, file a recipe post under “Recipe” not “Alexis Cooks” because more people will be searching for the term recipe than a more obscure phrase or term. Also, when selecting the structure for your permalinks (the permanent web address that will link back to your post) choose a structure based on your categories and blog post titles, not by a date structure! A category structured permalink may look something like this yourblogname.com/recipe/WorldsBestMeatballs, while a date structure would read more like yourblogname.com/2014/10/26/WorldsBestMeatballs. I think you can see, that the first example is much clearer for people to understand, and that means it’s also clearer for search engines to understand when filing search results!

7. Share your links through social media.

Once you have done all the hard work of creating and writing a great blog post, your work doesn’t end once you hit publish! You need to make sure you put the links to your awesome content out there on the internet for people to find and for search engines to link back to! The more links to your blog floating out there in the web, the better, but make sure not to inundate your social media feed with an endless stream of links. I think a reasonable rule of thumb is not to post more than 1-2 links per hour per social media feed!

8. Own your own domain.

In case you didn’t know, it’s always better to own your own domain than to stick with a third party blogging service domain. Once I moved my blog to strangecharmed.com from strangeandcharmed.blogspot.com, my traffic grew rapidly! Although that .blogspot.com or .wordpress.com may seem harmless, it actually overcomplicates your domain and makes it harder for people to find your blog because its actually just a sub-webpage of a larger website. Even if you can’t go the self-hosted wordpress route that I recommend, make sure to spend the extra few dollars a year to buy your own custom domain, even if you stay with blogspot or other similar blogging platforms.

9. Choose a blog layout that shows your complete post on the page- don’t make people click through for additional page views!

We have all been to blogs and websites that only display a summary or the first few lines of a post in their feed, enticing you to click through to the full post if you want to continue reading. Some people consider this something of a nuisance, preferring to click out of the website rather than to pay the toll of an additional page view before any real value has been acquired, but research is now showing that this style of layout actually hurts page views in your SEO rankings as well as annoying your readers. Remember, if it takes a real person an extra step to get to your full content, it also adds an extra step for the search engine as well, and when push comes to shove, your content may be spot on, but if you are putting a barrier between your readers and your content, your traffic and SEO ranking will suffer. If you are using this sort of layout, you should be able to change the default in your websites “reading” options by changing your posts to Full Text instead of Summary.

10. Reach out to other bloggers and do guest posts to increase your inbound links.

Having multiple inbound links is another way to bolster your rankings in SEO, and the best and most legitimate way to do this is via guest blogging on other sites. Not only will guest blogging give you the opportunity to get your content out in front of a new audience that may then begin to drive traffic to your site, but the actual links from other blogs to your blog will show up in search results and improve your site’s overall SEO performance! So make some valuable blogging connections and put your name out there beyond your own little corner of the internet, and you will see a myriad of different benefits!

So, those are my 10 SEO Tips for Bloggers! Like I said earlier, most of these tips are the sorts of things you end up doing as you grow your blog and improve your blogging skills overall, but it’s good to know how much certain techniques are actually helping you beyond the obvious! If you enjoyed this post and you are a blogger, feel free to link back to this post from your own blog and share these important tips with your blogger friends! Also, leave a comment down below if you have any other great SEO tips you think would be helpful to share!

xoxo,