If you write blogs for a living or just for leisure, it is obvious that you want your blog to be made search engine friendly.
Blog marketing is an easy and effective way to increase the site’s traffic while providing fresh and relevant information.
Blogging is also important for SEO purposes as it boosts your chances of being searched on the results page in a search engine because readers search for important and relevant informative blogs.
SEO for your blog can be a tricky business if you don’t know how to make it more effective, blog writers often search for tips and tricks to make their blog more optimized.
Read on how to build your blog more searchable over the search engines with these SEO tips for your blog:
Do your research properly
Blogs are often stuffed with irrelevant keywords which may not be helpful in ranking up the blog to the topmost search results. There are many tools and techniques to help you in your search for relevant keywords which you may not have done otherwise. Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool and SEMrush.com are two, one of the sources the help you offer tools for your keyword research related to your topic and keep an eye on the competitors and if the keywords that are being used by them are engaging more traffic to their sites.
Focus on 1-2 long tail Keywords
Earlier the keywords were added recklessly without context but now it hurts your blog’s SEO ranking and Google considers it as keyword ‘stuffing’ and rejects any entries which carry more than necessary keywords.
Google likes sites that have many pages and attract relevant and valuable traffic to sites that 1-2 long tail keywords, ones which provide specific search related customer’s queries.
Readers are more likely to read and retain themselves on a site that has more of specific answers to their queries and is specifically informative. Basically generating the ‘right’ kind of traffic
Make the blog Mobile friendly
More people are searching for blogs and apps through the phones now than a computer. Due to this reason, Google displays search results that support mobile user interface first. Ever since the launch of Google’s Penguin algorithm, it started preferring mobile-friendly sites since 2015.
One way to make your blogs engage more traffic is by making it a ‘responsive design’ to mobile platforms like our blogs.
This will help the blog’s SEO as any inbound links that come back into the site would not divide into two URLs and as a result, we can centralize the power of the SEO to promote the blog’s searches in Google.
Make use of the meta description space fully
Meta descriptions are short descriptions of your page in a brief and display below the title of the page on the SERP’s and let the readers know what the link is about. It all depends if you meta descriptions if specific to the searcher’s requirements and if they’ll click the link or not.
Google has a specific amount of space for meta descriptions on its search pages which is around 150-160 characters and after that Google truncates the description. It is important to write the best-suited description which should also include long tail keywords to rank up your blog.
Add Images with Alt text
Google not just crawls text but also images but as text, because it is unable to identify images the way humans see them. Not just plane images but with images with a descriptive or alternate text. As it also counts as a part of the content for the blog. It may seem like a minor change but can affect your search engine rankings a lot.
Avoid using similar topics tags
Topic tags help to organize the blog topics in the site’s pages according to their topics. Different topic tags would serve as every different page for the site and can be harmful to the site as it will count as content duplicacy, later rejected by Google. Stuffing blogs with similar title tags can be troublesome For example, ‘marketing’, ‘market’ and ‘marketing strategies’ are too similar to be used in one blog itself.
Use social media to widen your reach
Social Media is a versatile platform for any media be it blogs, images or vidoes. Businesses tend to promote their site over social media for growth but it is also important to make your blogs shareable over social media platforms. It helps in engaging traffic from these platforms to the website of the company. Digital marketing agencies like Read Colors often go hand in hand with Social Media Marketing for the promotion of blogs and content.
Use synonymous URL’s
Sites should make use of URLs for search engines more favourable and that make it easier for them and website visitors to understand the content on the page. URL structures can act as categorization. Search engines appreciate this and make it easier for readers to access new and different blog pages on the site pages.
Usage of inbound link
Inbound links help show search engines the validity or relevancy of your content and same goes for linking the pages internally for example linking different blog posts, ebooks, or journals. It helps in increasing the engagement of the readers to the entirety of the website.
Put Google’s analytics to use
Google has many free tools such as the Search Console which has the Search Analytics Report and helps us analyze clicks from Google Search. Blog posts don’t start ranking immediately, it takes time for it to build up search authority.
It is more about relevance rather than abundance. It is required to optimize your blog posts for making them appear on the top of searches over search engines.
For more information on Google’s functioning read our blog Google’s New Algorithm Creates New Articles from Your Content, in the Readcolors blogs.