Do you find it hard to get your voice heard over the noise from the increasingly competitive world around us? Ensuring your blog posts are optimised as best they can be will help you, but how do you go about it?
You will probably already know that search engines use algorithms in order to place web pages within their search results. Checks are performed on words, phrases, images and much more – so when you get thee right ones in your blog and the hidden „meta data“ that sites behind it all – this will deliver the best possible results for you and ensure that the person who has come across your blog page has all the information they need, clearly and concisely.
10 ways to ensure your blog is optimised
Here are 10 ways that will ensure your blog is optimised onsite for the best possible search engine placement and the best chance of standing out from the crowd and being found by people searching the web.
1 – Blog post Title – Optimising the blog post title to include the key term that is most relevant to you post is number 1 here. Generally speaking, the closer your key term appears to the beginning of the title the better the results will be. There is a bit of a stand off here though because you also want to ensure that your post gets read – so make sure that your post title is interesting enough for people to want to open it but descriptive enough to get the key term in there. After all, you want people to be opening and sharing this blog post over social media, the more shares you attract, the more worthy and popular it appears in the eyes of the search engines.
2 – URL – Optimising the url is just as important as optimising the title. With CMS systems such as WordPress or Joomla it is easy to do this and they will generally set the url automatically but it doesn’t mean that it is optimised. Check the url before saving and posting your blog post. Changing it after it has been ranked already will result in people searching your blog page might end up getting a dreaded 404 error page instead of your blog post.
3 – Tags – Proper use of tags in a blog page will ensure that you are picked up better by the search engines and using key words in those headers is very important. <h1> should only be used once and then follow on as you go down the post with <h2> all the way to <h6> if you like. This will give the search engines a clear picture of what is important in your blog post.
4 – Meta – Optimising your meta title and description is very important as this summarises your post to the search engines. Include your key terms close to the beginning and take advantage of the marketing opportunity! Write something that will make people want to click on your post!!
5 – Images – Optimising your images by ensuring that they are of a small file size, that they have descriptive names and ensure that the images alt text is filled out. If all three of these things are done then your images will help boost your pages ranking.
6 – Key Words – Include key words and phrases in the blog post itself BUT avoid the temptation to stuff the post full of them all you will lose all SEO value completely. A good rule of thumb is to concentrate on a few keywords and sprinkle them liberally throughout the page.
7 – Long Tail – If you want your blog page to get picked up by prospects at every stage of the buying cycle, from info gathering to purchase then use long tail keywords (usually two or three words). These are particularly useful to searchers who are looking for something specific.
8 – Responsive – If you want all your viewers to look at your blog page then ensure that it displays perfectly on tablet and mobile. Responsive design is arguably as important in this day and age as SEO itself as a recent study by Google showed that 61% of mobile visitors simply click away if the site they are looking at doesn’t display correctly on a mobile device.
9 – Category Tags – It is tempting to create a whole load of tags to match every blog post, however, you need to understand something – every time you create a new tag, a new page on your website is also generated. If you over do the tags then it begins to look like you are filling up your website with duplicate content and you will start to see a drop in the search engine rankings. Stick to around 20 tags max if you can and only two to three per blog post.
10 – Linking – If you are linking out to websites (not internal links) then it can be a good idea to use the nofollow tag. This is especially true if you are linking off to lots of different websites as this will ensure you are not seen as endorsing them. The nofollow tag allows you to link without completely recommending the website and is much better for SEO. You don’t need to nofollow if you are linking to other pages of your own website or related posts etc.
Stay Up To Date with SEO
Google is the most popular search engine by far and is the one that everyone wants to be at the top of. The best way to find out more about SEO is to visit the SEO section in Google Webmaster tools and get the latest information.
In today’s world, things are changing fast and guidelines are regularly updated so it is worth checking on Google to ensure that you are keeping abreast of the latest development.
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