As a blogger, SEO has long been something I’ve needed to work with so I could get my blog in front of more eyes.
If you’re considering becoming a blogger, you may be a little mystified about what SEO is, and how you can use it. If this is the case, this post is for you. Here are some top ways you can #SEOYourBlog:
Pick the right keywords
Whichever niche your blog is in, you probably want to get as many readers as possible right? You can do this by choosing the right keywords. Keywords are the search terms that your potential readers are typing into Google. I think about the topics I want to write about and then I use a tool like Google Keyword Planner to look for search terms. This helps me find keywords with low competition and high search volume so I have a greater chance of ranking for those keywords.
Use Categories and Tags
Tags help you organise your content so readers can find what they’re looking for. Each of your posts can have many different tags, and then readers can click on each tag to find other posts with that tag. While a post category could be broad, say “Europe Travel”, your tags could be for each country or city you visit (if you’re a travel blogger), for example “Paris”, “Rome” etc.
Link internally
If you look at many of my blog posts, you’ll see that I link to other blog posts I’ve written about the same or similar subjects. This creates a map of posts, which encourages readers to stay on your site for longer. But it’s also great for search engines, which crawl your website and can see this interlinking network of blog posts and pages.
Optimize for SEO
There are a few other things you’ll also need to do for SEO, unless you can hire a company like click.co.uk to do them for you. The first is optimizing your title tags. Title tags are the HTML elements specifying the title of each of your web pages. This is the clickable headline on the search results page. You’ll want to use your keywords here, but keep your title under 60 characters for best results.
Your meta description is also important, and this is the small paragraph of text under your title. I usually like to write my own meta description, and use compelling copy to encourage people to click on each post.
