A bit of a different one on the blog today, guys. I know I’m predominantly a style blog (or claim to be), and not to blow my own trumpet here, but I’m pretty scrubbed up on the basics of SEO *wink and point*. When you’re surrounded by it daily and your boyfriend is an SEO nerd, you kind of live it, so it becomes second nature to inspect a site right down to the bone.
I’ll be honest, I’ve become pretty sick of seeing bloggers spam their titles to death, assuming that it will do wonders for ranking for a particular term, with no understanding of how it all works. I’ll be the first to say that I do not use it to my advantage as much as should do, but I also want to share what I do know so you’re not in the dark about where to start, and these are pretty simple changes, so they’re worth doing.
- First thing’s first – MOVE YOUR BLOG FROM BLOGGER TO WORDPRESS. Although it might not seem like it yet, WordPress is a CMS that is a lot easier to navigate and use. It gives you the ability to customise any aspect of your blog and allows you to add plugins that might improve the quality of your audience’s journey around your site.
- INSTALL THE YOAST SEO PLUGIN. So this is a must if you’re wanting to improve your SEO capabilities for your blog. Using a traffic light system, the plugin helps you figure out exactly what you need to add on to your blog post, like tags to your images, meta descriptions, and an SEO title.Let me break it down for you:
Your meta description is a 160 character snippet that summarises what is included in your post. It shows up when you Google phrases included in the description and really helps click through rates from search results.
Your SEO title will be key in you ranking for a particular keyword. But remember you need to make it good enough to click into – it’s all good and well ranking, but if readers aren’t clicking into the post, it’s useless. Pick a decent focus keyword to include in your title – this is SO important if you want to be seen in Google. - LINK HORIZONTALLY. If you’ve got older posts that might be relevant to the one you’re writing, link back to it!
- DON’T SPAM YOUR POST WITH KEYWORDS. This is a really old SEO method, and it doesn’t work anymore. Google has developed so much over the years, so trying to cram it in everywhere (PARTICULARLY YOUR REGULAR POST TITLE) is not going to work. Please, please stop doing it.
- GET YOURSELF SOME LINKS. If you’re doing quite well with your blog, you’ll be getting links naturally, but this will also improve your ranking capabilities. It might mean writing content for other sites, but that link in your bio will be invaluable – just make sure the site you’re being linked from is of high authority and NOT spammy. SIDE NOTE: Also, remember that naturally including links in unsponsored posts is not going to get your penalised – it’s a common misconception. Don’t overthink the fact that you’ve got to nofollow links.
- RESEARCH OR ASK SOMEONE RELIABLE. There is a myriad of information regarding SEO tactics online, and that can often do more harm to your chances of being seen, than good. Honestly, it’s always best to speak to someone about what else you could do to improve your blog’s SEO, rather than Googling ‘how to improve my site’s SEO.’ – Trust me. If you’d like more information of what else you could do to improve your SEO capabilities, tweet me or Adam with your questions!
