The Basics of SEO for Bloggers
Here is a list of SEO basics — all the essential
need-to-know stuff — for bloggers, beginners, and other non-bots:
1. Write a good title
A good page title is your bread-and-butter. It
should include your keywords as close to the beginning of the title as
possible. (FYI: Your page title isn’t always the same as your headline.)
You can see the page title by looking at the top of
your browser window. For instance, You’ll see that mine is: “SEO Basics for
Bloggers & Beginners | Goins, Writer” but that I have a slightly different
headline.
Try to keep it under 66 characters total, so that
it doesn’t get cropped by search engines.
2. Link-build
Links are essential to growing your search rank
(especially others linking to your site). There are three ways to do
this:
- Link out to other helpful articles using anchor text with your keyword or keyword phrase.
- Get other people to link to you, either by asking (don’t be a sleaze) or by writing great content.
- Link to other articles on your site using anchor text. (This is just a fancy word for embedding links directly into text and not just the URLs.)
Inbound links (or “backlinks“) are the most important, but all are
helpful. A great strategy for building links (other than writing killer content)
is guest posting.
3. Mention keywords
Choosing a keyword is
one of the hardest parts of SEO. What will your article be about? Once
you choose a topic that is hopefully relevant to your site’s topic, then you
need to include it in a few other places:
- The page title and headline
- In the URL
- In the body of your article
- In your site’s metadata
Use your keyword within the first paragraph of
your blog post. Starting off with a question is a great way to do this
without sounding like a robot.
Also, use it a handful of times in the body of your
post (but not too much), linking to any relevant resources on your site or
others about the topic, using anchor text.
4. Don’t write too little
Make your post the ideal length: 300-500 words.
Going over 500 is fine (unless it means your
readers won’t read it, which can increase your bounce rate), but less than 300
isn’t ideal.
In other words, you’re not Seth Godin, and don’t
try to be.
5. Focus on frequency
Posting frequently (more than once a week) teaches
search engines to come back and check your website more regularly, which will
cause your pages to rank more highly over time.
6. Don’t neglect metadata
Meta means “information about
information.” It’s the invisible stuff that search engines see about your
content that your readers don’t. While this is not as important as text on your
site, it is a factor.
Include keywords in your meta tags, as well as
your page title and
description. Some blog themes already do this for you. If not, find one that
does or use a third-party app like a plugin to help you.
A free WordPress plugin that does this quite well
is All in One
SEO Pack. Or, you could spend the dollars to invest into a product
like Scribe SEO, which helps you with metadata,
keywords, and all things SEO.
7. Make good use of images
Rename the file name to include your keywords and
include them in your image title, alt text, and description (this is also meta
data).
Images can also help hold the reader’s interest and
can lead them to click other content on your site, as well.
8. Use categories
Intelligently name your categories to focus on
major keywords your blog may talk about (e.g. “Stuff” isn’t a great category
name). And please rename your “uncategorized” category title to something less
lame (e.g. “Miscellaneous” or “General”).
This builds more links to your content on your site
and allows search engines to see that you’re linking to keywords on your site.
9. Add header tags
This is a little technical, but not as hard as it
sounds.
If your site’s theme has an option for adding
headings or subheads (this is a built-in feature for WordPress), then it’s no
sweat. If not, all you have to do is add some simple code into the HTML section
of your article.
You should use subheads to lead your reader through
the article, but also use variations of your keywords in your H1, H2, and H3
tags. (Note: Don’t use the H1 tag in a post if your blog system
pulls this from your title.)
10. Get social
While the vote is out on how much links from
social networks like Facebook and Twitter affect
SEO, it is a factor.
However, the more important reason is that shared
content via social
media gets attention (and ultimately links) from other bloggers
website admins.
I’ve often seen that when one of my posts gets a
lot of traction on Twitter, it starts acquiring backlinks within a few days.
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