Sadly SEO is a major part of owning a successful blog. If you want to get found and get read you need to combat the basics of SEO. But that doesn’t mean you have to listen or read even half the rubbish they tell you about, you just need to cover the blog SEO basics…
Keywords
10 – Keywords
You don’t have to do keyword research for the entire blog post, but it is worth taking a look and see how other people have named their blogs that are in a similar style to what you have written. But thinking how people will search for your blog post title is all the keyword research you need to do.
Page Titles and Meta Descriptions
9 – Page Titles and Meta Descriptions
By making sure you use page titles (this is not your blog post title) and Meta descriptions you will do well in the rankings because 99% of most bloggers simply won’t bother. Make sure you do them from the start and you will be found and read in no time.
Title, Caption, Alt Text & Description
8 – Title, Caption, Alt Text & Description
This is something that can get boring quickly but is well worth doing as more and more people are searching via images rather than text. The caption is not really necessary, but it nice to have. The rest is a must have. After all, Google is good, but its image recognition is not great and it doesn’t really know what each picture is. You need to tell it what it is so it can them make sure people can find it when they come looking.
Sitemap
7 – Sitemap
Adding a site map sounds like the most basic of things to do, but you would be truly surprised just how many bloggers will not bother. There are loads of plugins that make it for you, you just have to install them and ignore them!
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Reach
6 – Reach
By making sure the blog post has reach means you will soon shot up the rankings above many others without. Reach is little more than making sure it is liked, shared and tweeted. But you can do that yourself every post. Then after a few months why not tweet and reshare old posts. This sort of great content recycling is a good way to grow artificial reach on posts that might not have any.
URL
5 – URL
There are two things to try and do here. One is to make sure it is not too long (never longer than 60 characters) and the other is to make sure your title keyword is in there (if possible).
Content
4 – Content
It’s the hardest part of blogging but making sure you regularly keep that good quality content published is the best way to grow a blog and help it up those rankings.
Social Media
3 – Social Media
Social media is a big part of SEO these days and by making sure those social media pages are active and regularly published to will soon help you climb the rankings.
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Backlinks
2 – Backlinks
This is something people fear. With all the nofollow this, guest post that rubbish that goes around all you really need to worry about is those natural backlinks. Is all your social media profiles pointing to your blog, does that blog network you joined to have a blog link on the profile pages? By making sure these things are done you really don’t need to worry about any other sort of backlink.
Page Speed
1 – Page Speed
This one really throws some people. It doesn’t have to be super fast, but it does have to be quick at least. Any loading time past about 5 seconds and you will not rank well. But a good page cache will soon make it work like a dream. Another good thing to do is ask yourself if you really need a widget or not. Removing one widget can knock a lot of time off your page load times.
If you do have any other questions or your own SEO tips I would love to hear them.