IF YOU’RE a blogger, then one of the most important things you need to do when it comes to your blog is optimise it for SEO. There are a number of reasons that optimising for SEO is so important, but first and foremost, it’ll help you be found and picked up by search engines like Google. This, in turn, will increase your visibility, thus leading to increased revenue and visibility (in theory, at least). Still, if you’re new to blogging or if you’re new to the world of SEO, then you may not know how blogging SEO works. Here’s how to optimise a blog for SEO.
Don’t be afraid to get help
As a blogger, your talent lies in being able to construct content that’s interesting and relevant. Your strengths might not lie in SEO, and if they don’t, there’s no shame at all in seeking the help of a professional. That’s where sites like inetventures.com come in; they can help you with blogger outreach so that you can build organic links and get people coming to your site naturally. You don’t need to worry too much about SEO if you don’t want to, since there are lots of sites out there that will help you with this aspect of building your blog.
Pick your keywords carefully
If you do want to work on your SEO yourself, then it’s important to make sure that you’re picking your keywords carefully. Pick one or two keywords per article and use them gracefully throughout the content. Don’t try to stuff keywords into the article, as this is regarded very unfavourably by Google and may actually result in a lowering of your ranking. Elegantly peppering your keywords throughout your article will result in a much more favourable SEO boost for you and won’t make Google think you’re just trying to build links artificially.
Write for readability first
Thanks to the new Google helpful content update, the rules regarding content creation have changed. It’s no longer acceptable to write for audiences you don’t normally court without expertise, nor should you write for SEO robots first and foremost. Google will now penalise you for failing to write for a human audience; content is now prioritised if it answers questions properly or if it’s geared towards readability. That’s why you need to make sure you’re writing for comprehension first and foremost. SEO is important, but if your content is readable, Google will treat it better than if it’s simply an SEO jamboree.
Use images and optimise them
If you’re not using images in your content, then you’re missing out on a huge part of your blog’s SEO strategy. Inline images are a big part of Google crawling your site; including images means people will also be able to find you on Google Images, after all, and images also help to break up content, which is good for readability. You need to make sure the image is optimised properly, though. This means trawling the metadata to ensure it’s correct, as well as writing descriptive and comprehensive alt text that adequately describes the image for accessibility purposes.
Link internally
Internal links are one of the ways in which Google crawls your site for SEO purposes. Of course, just including links to other posts you’ve written or other pages on your blog isn’t necessarily a good thing; there is, like with anything else, a list of best practices you should be implementing if you want to use internal linking as an SEO strategy. These include using links sparingly, only linking to content that is directly relevant to the post you’re creating, and making sure you’re combing your site regularly to spot and weed out any dead links.
Optimise for mobile
Many people are going to be reading your content on a mobile device of some kind. Whether it’s a smartphone or a tablet, you can’t rely on every reader accessing your blog via desktop or laptop, so it’s important to make sure your blog looks great on mobile devices as well. Most website creation kits, like WordPress or Squarespace, will include this service as standard, so you only need to worry about this if you’re specifically working with a web designer (who will almost certainly optimise for mobile as part of their service anyway).
Follow EAT principles
Demonstrating expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (EAT) is critical when it comes to getting your site ranked on Google. It should be pretty self-explanatory, but expertise refers to your level of knowledge on a subject, while authority relates to how well you communicate that knowledge. Trustworthiness refers to the consistency with which you create great, reliable content; if you only ever write one excellent blog post and everything else you write is underwhelming, you aren’t a trustworthy source, and Google won’t rank you highly as a result.
Write for your target audience
As we’ve already mentioned, the Google helpful content update prioritises writing authoritatively and knowledgeably, but it also prioritises those who write for the audience for which their content is intended. For example, if your blog is known for gaming content, suddenly branching out into parenting advice wouldn’t be seen as a positive thing. Google would see it essentially as dilettantism, and it wouldn’t be good for your existing audience either. That’s why it’s important to write for your target audience and always keep in mind what kind of register they prefer.
