Search Engine Optimization, or SEO as it’s popularly known, is not an easy task. Particularly not when you’re discussing ranking of a blog. The huge competition that exists in every niche of blogging makes it hard to optimize your blog for ranking on the first page of Google. However, with the right approach and guidance, this task can certainly be made more accessible. Here we’re going to provide you nine tips that you can follow for the SEO of your blog. Let’s get started.
The ideal way to begin your search engine optimization is from on-page optimization. Several site-wide on-page optimization tasks can improve the overall SEO of your blog, and you should do them. Creating a proper robots.txt file, a sitemap, home page meta description, appropriate title with included major keywords of the niche, and compressed images with proper alt tags are a few essential on-page optimization tasks that affect the overall SEO of your blog. You should do each of them when you start working on the SEO of your blog.
Google offers a range of SEO tools to webmasters in the form of Search Console. You should set it up for your blog if you want your site to be indexed properly and quickly by Google. When you start setting it up by adding your site, it will ask you a few questions for the first time (one of them also being the submission of sitemap).
Answer them, and you’ll be good to go. The console not only allows you to see how Google is crawling your site but also how your website is performing in SERPs of Google. All this information can be of critical importance for the SEO of your blog.
The speed of your site plays a significant role in affecting its SEO. Websites that load faster are prioritized in Google’s search results, so you should ensure that your site loads more quickly than your competitors. There are many online tools available to help you analyze your site speed against the speed of your competitors.
Two common factors that affect site speed are JavaScript and images. So, you should avoid having too many JavaScript elements in your web pages, while images should be compressed to load faster. You can also take help of a caching plugin to make your site load faster.
Google conveyed it a long time ago that it uses HTTPS as a ranking signal. If your website is not on HTTPS, you would be ranked below your competitors who have their websites loading on HTTPS. Therefore, you must install an SSL certificate on your site.
And it’s also not a costly affair anymore – you can easily find a cheapest SSL certificate to protect your website from many different vendors. For example, you should choose a wildcard certificate for your root domain and its unlimited subdomains protection.
Keyword research is the holy grail of blog SEO. You can’t get enough traffic for your blog if you’re not targeting at least a few long-tail keywords. So do your keyword research and find out some long-tail keywords for which you can get your blog to rank.
Then develop content around those keywords, including detailed articles and topic clusters (more on it below). Optimize the content for your long-tail keywords, do a little bit of link-building, and soon you’ll have a few pages driving lots of traffic to your blog.
It’s of utmost importance to optimize your content correctly for the keywords of your choice. Besides the body of your content, its title, headings, URL, meta description, and image alt tags – all should contain the keywords that you’re trying to target. And those keywords must be closely related to each other; otherwise, you won’t be able to rank for them. Ensure that you follow this rule for all those pages that are targeting long-tail keywords.
A strong internal linking structure not only helps in keeping visitors longer on your site by giving them more content to read but also helps in the SEO of your website. Internal links (also known as inbound links) tell Google that you’ve other relevant content on the subject, which is a good sign of your authority. So, whenever you write a blog post and talk about a topic that has been covered earlier in another blog post, link to it. You can also do the same for e-books and other web pages on your blog.
We just talked about the importance of inbound links. You can also take this strategy to the next level if you want to develop topic clusters. Just select broad topics related to your niche, find out some long-tail keywords related to them, and create a lot of content around those specific keywords linking to each other. You need to do this with 5-6 articles at least – the more, the better. If your focus on this subject, it will help to increase Google’s search algorithm. Your content on that subject may start ranking high immediately after it’s published.
It’s essential to measure the ROI of various marketing techniques. And to do that, you must have Google Analytics set up properly. It helps you by providing all the data that you need to make informed marketing decisions. It also boosts your SEO by helping Google to detect those pages of your site, which are performing well due to social media or any other reason.
These nine tips can give an excellent start to the SEO campaign for your blog. While the highest impact on your blog traffic comes from backlinks that you receive, the benefit of those backlinks can be maximized if you’ve implemented these nine steps. So, apply them today and kick-start your SEO in the right direction. Happy blogging!
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