Do you know your SEO from your ABC? Or is your knowledge a little sketchy?
A few months ago as part of this Blog Club series I posted SEO for bloggers – 13 tips to maximise traffic. Since then I have heard lots of conversations highlighting that a fair few people still don’t SEO their blog posts. If you just write for your mum, then it probably doesn’t matter (my mum doesn’t read mine!), but if you want someone else to find and read your posts, then you really need to understand SEO and learn how to make it work for you and your blog. So if you didn’t read my other SEO post, then pop over and have a little read, I will wait here….. finished? Great, well I thought I could take things a step further and look at some other factors that influence SEO.
- Guest post on a high-ranking site – By guest posting on a high-ranking site you will get a precious back link. Not only that, but that back link will have more authority than ones from lower ranked site; Google will like that.
- Long tail keywords – over 70% of google search terms are long tail keywords – terms that are made up of 5-7 words. They are more specific and bring more targeted visitors to your blog. Think about posting about your beach holiday in Spain. Imagine how many websites have used the keywords beach holiday in spain, wait I’ll tell you… 159 million! Yep that’s right, so your blog post will be number 159,000,001. However, if you use Beach holiday in spain with a toddler (for example), it drops to 9,250,000. So there are fewer people looking, but your post will be MUCH more visible to the people wanting to read about EXACTLY what you have written about. So more people will read your post and Google will decide you are an authority and a trusted site and will rank you higher.
- Coding – Coding around your text highlights to the search bots the important parts of your post. So use things like <H1> headings, a unique and relevant title for each page and make sure all your pages have a proper meta tag description.
- Blog Speed – The faster your blog loads the happier your readers will be, they will return more and Google will see this. Making sure you reduce the size of your pictures can have an effect, but if you google ‘making my blog load faster’ you will find lots of help.
- Use your keyword across social media – Social media is contributing more to SEO all the time. Therefore, use the same keyword used in your blog post in your social media promotion.
- Submit a site map to search engines – Site maps help make your blog easier to search for. This might seem very complicated, however, there is a WordPress plugin called the Google XML Sitemap Generator. Simply install it, change the settings as appropriate and it will automatically update your site map and submit changes to search engines. Simple!
- Make sharing your posts easy – This is a bit obvious, but the easier it is to share your posts, the more people will do so and consequently the more traffic you will get. Pleasing Google along the way.
- Share your post on Google+ – Sharing posts on Google + will help your SEO more than a share on any other social media platform (assuming your following are equal).
- Email your posts – Help people to find your posts. Don’t forget that traffic is still one of the highest factors in terms of rankings on search engines.
- SEO agencies – There are many unscrupulous SEO agencies who charge a lot of money and can actually do your blog damage. I don’t know about you, but I receive these emails multiple times a day!
- Learn how to do SEO yourself – A private SEO course that is relevant to your blog is usually more effective than learning general SEO theory in a public class.
Do you regularly SEO your posts?
Disclosure: This is a collaborative post.
Comments 39
Some really useful tips here Aby – just about to download the Sitemap plug in now! Thanks for sharing.
Author
My pleasure x
Great post. I did an online SEO course back in 2004 & have performed SEO on sites gor other people as well as my own over the years & yet I still don’t optimise every single blog post! This is a great reminder of the basics!!
So helpful as always. I really need to look at this more x
Author
Thanks lovely xx
As with a lot of your posts blogging I have saved this for reference. Really helpful and thanks for sharing 🙂
Author
My pleasure huni x
I have been wondering about site maps, thank you for that tip! I’m off to look at that plugin!
Author
Hope it helps x
Thank you for this. It is something that I have not got my head round yet and know that I need to. Kirsten
Great tips as always Aby, I am learning more about SEO and some of your points I hadn’t considered. x
Yet another super useful post, I am bad at rarely making sure I have used SEO in a post. xx #sharewithme
I didn’t know about coding and metatags, so will take a look at that. I also didn’t think about social media keywords. I put keywords into the SEO section on wordpress but will now make sure that they are in other places too. Thank you x
Author
My pleasure x
Great post. I use the Yoast plug in for help but I think I need to focus on longer (more specific) key words. Thanks for sharing! #TheList
Author
Yoast is brilliant, you just need to make sure it is working hard enough for you x
Thanks for sharing this Aby! i’m still getting to grips with SEO. I really think a course maybe needed! Both of them are such informative blog tip posts. You’re definitely my blog guru/go to for tips. xx
Author
Always happy to help if I can 🙂 xx
Great post thank you, SEO is definitely my weak point, I need all the help I can get!
Great tip about the 5-7 words and those stats – wow. #TheList
Author
Sometimes a couple of things can make all difference x
Great advice as always, I’ve got so much to learn! #TheList
brilliant tips Aby! I’m pretty rubbish at pimping up the SEO on my site but will give all this a go for sure, thanks for taking the time to share x #thelist
Author
My pleasure hun, I hope it helps x
Fab tips Aby, I thought I understood SEO but clearly not! thankyou x
Author
Glad it helps huni x
This is such a great post, very useful x
#thelist
Really useful tips here thank you Aby! I really need to look at getting my page to load faster, think it’s down to all the high-res images and the fact my layout width is wider xx
Author
Thanks lovely! I would love wider pics, not good enough at code to adjust it though 🙂 xx
I’m always looking for more SEO tips. I’m doing better now than my first posts when I didn’t have a clue. But I still need to make a sitemap & fix up old posts. So much to think of as a new blogger. Thank you for the great tips. #TheList x
Author
I hope they help huni x
Thank you for this. This topic is really confusing to me and I really need to sit down and work this out. One of the midnight task… #TheList
Author
I hope it helps x
I use an SEO plugin but that’s as far as I get with it. I really need to up my game this year and learn more about it all and how my blog is ranked and found as my traffic is slowing dying out instead of getting bigger. Thanks for all the information as always Aby you are so knowledgable. Thanks for linking up to Share With Me. I hope to see you again soon. #sharewithme
Author
I hope it helps huni x
Amazing tips my love. Didn’t know half of these! Thanks so much for sharing, this is really very, very useful indeed. (Thank you!) xxx
Author
Glad it is helpful my love xxx
A really good post. I don’t use wordpress i am on blogger so would love some tips on how to optimize blogger posts for SEO XX
Thank you so much for the information! Invaluable!