For your website or blog to perform well in search engine results, the website needs to have good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Without it, your site may appear on the second, third or even on the 10th page of search results. Every website owner should aim to be at the number 1 spot for a keyword. Research shows that the number one search result gets clicked 50%-60% more times then the second result.
To help combat this issue of being further down the search rankings, here are 10 basic tips to increase your blogs chance of perform well in search engine results.
1. Structure Your Website
It is always good practice to structure your files on your website appropriately. It is a bad idea to have every single file in the root directory. Make sure you make good use folders. Having a good website structure and a well organised website, this will help your SEO.
2. Use Permalinks And Don’t Change Them
When you setup a new blog, especially a WordPress blog, make sure you develop a good permalink structure from day one. A permalink structure such as index.php?p=2 is bad for SEO as it doesn’t tell you anything about the post or webpage you are viewing. It is better that you include the title of the post, the date, categories, or even keywords in the URL. For example, you may want to have a URL like this /blogging/seo/tips/improve-your-blog-seo.html. There are so many different variations. Look around other blogs and see what they use.
3. Write For Humans
Often people tend to flood their posts with keywords. Although this can improve SEO, you’re not really writing it for it to be read by humans. If you want people to subscribe and regularly read your blog, you want to make your blog easy to read. If people like your post, and it is easy to read, they may link to it which can improve your blogs pagerank. I am not saying not to include keywords throughout your post, just make sure you don’t go over the top doing it.
4. Research Your Keywords
In every post that you write, try to keep in mind one or two main keywords that you want to use. Use keyword research tools (which we have a great list in our Blogging Resource Hub), and find some similar keywords that you can use as well. You might want to check out Google Wonder Wheel for that. You can access Google Wonder Wheel by click Show Options when doing a Google search.
As you can in the image, I typed in ‘blog seo‘, which I then clicked ‘blog seo tips‘. Following from that, I clicked ‘search engine optimization seo techniques‘. As you can see, it has provided me with many other similar keywords I can include in my post.
5. Use Key Phrases
It will never hurt your blog to use a few key phrases in your posts. Key phrases can help you establish a niche for your blog, and can help improve your search engine results. For this blog, a few key phrase include Create A Successful Blog and learn how to blog courses. I try to use them as much as I can throughout my website.
6. Carefully Place Your Keywords
Once you have a set of keywords that you want to use in your blog, you need ensure that these words are highlighted throughout your website. I don’t mean highlighted as in colour it yellow or green, I mean bold or italics them. Also, ensure that you include these keywords in header tags, alt attributes, title tags, title attributes, description tags, anchored tags, navigation, links, and header tags.
Highlight Example:
At Create A Successful Blog, we will teach you how to blog using a variety of techniques. We teach you how you can make money blogging and the strategies used to a make a six figure income. By signing up to our courses, you will learn how to make your blog successful and get thousands of readers!
7. Use Your Heading Text Appropriately
Have you noticed on Create A Successful Blog that our posts are structured in a way that it is easy to read by having the posts broken down into headers? We could easily write all this information in a few paragraphs, but we decided to make good use of the header tag. By using headers, it emphasises on key terms, it allows the reader to easily read through only the things that they are interested in. When you use headers, remember to use the <h1>, <h2> and <h3> tags appropriately.
8. Encourage User Input
By encouraging user input, this increases the chance of people linking to it from other blogs which is extremely helpful for SEO. It also gives readers a sense of belonging, and more text on your page from comments is never a bad thing. Interaction with your readers is a very good thing, especially in the Web 2.0 era.
9. Follow Popular Trends
Another excellent tactic to try out is to follow, and write about popular trends. You may want to check out what is trending over at Twitter and write about those stories if they relate to your blog. However, you don’t want to bore your readers with content that are not interested in.
The advantage of following trends is because that is when most people are searching about a topic. The earlier you write something about an upcoming trend, the better chance you have of your post performing well on search engines. If you are the last to write about a trend, you want be at the top of search results. So make sure you get in early.
10. Highlight Key Words
As I mentioned in tip 7, it is a good idea to highlight key words by having them bold, underlined or in italics. This helps search engines target your keywords.
So there are 10 SEO tips I have provided. Did they work for you? Do you have other suggestions, because we would like to hear them.
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