8 Ways to Improve Your Blog SEO: A Quick and Dirty Guide
By: Delaney Jaye
Tags: Business, Marketing, Blog, Seo Tips, SEO

Many people now recognize the SEO potential of building out a blog, but in case this concept is new to you, here’s a quick explanation:

Every page on your website creates an opportunity to rank on Google (or any other search engine, but I’ll focus on Google here due to its obvious popularity).

By adding content (i.e. a blog) with keywords relevant to or surrounding your core business, you’ll create new opportunities to rank and find your dream customer each time. For example, if you’re a wedding dress retail business, you can likely find your key audience through other things relevant to someone shopping for a wedding dress.

It’s easy, in this example, to imagine some of the other things your target customer may be looking for on the internet. Depending on their stage in the wedding planning process, they may search for things like a guide to summer/winter weddings, inspiration for DIYing their centerpieces, or the main questions they should ask their day-of coordinator, etc. The list could go on-and-on.

By putting yourself in the shoes of your customer searching the web (and imagining the stage in the buying process you’d most like to find them in) combined with some keyword research, you’ll be well on your way to expanding the potential net that will pull your customer to you over time.

Note: Google frowns upon keyword “stuffing” — i.e. putting your keyword in the text too frequently. Stuffing looks disingenuous and can hurt your overall ranking opportunity. The key is to strike a balance: including your keyword consistently for clarity of the piece, but not so often that it makes the text less valuable, redundant, or hard to read.

Now for the fun part: SEO optimizing your blog

While there are many SEO tactics for optimizing the text within that blog post, less attention is paid to the non-text or behind the scenes opportunities for optimization. Without further ado, let’s dive in:

1. Structure your Content: Use header tags strategically.

You can manipulate the actual size of the text through HTML/CSS, but pay attention to the actual header tag. They go from H1 to H6.

For H1 in particular, there should be only one per page and it should include your main keyword. H2 is considered a high-ranking header and should have mention of your keywords at least a portion of the time. The remaining tags, H3-H6, should be used for your less relevant headers.

2. Optimize the Meta title and Meta description

Of the two, the title is the most important.

In addition to clearly and prominently stating your keyword in your title, you should also check the title for clickability. Your click-through ranking will impact whether Google ranks you or not (they don’t want a result at the top that no one clicks).

You can use a tool like the Co-Schedule headline analyzer for this purpose (it’s free, but requires an email address I believe): https://coschedule.com/headline-analyzer

The title and description should both have the keyword for the page (though the description can/should have it twice).

3. Name your included files with relevant keywords.

Your uploaded files are another good way to sprinkle the main point of your article, i.e. your keyword, into the page.

Instead of uploading an image titled: “IMG_12345.jpg” try something like, “TieredWeddingCakeForSummerWeddings.jpg”

It’s another way to help the Google crawlers understand how that photo (and all parts of your page) fit together.

4. Add ALT text to your images.

When you add an image to the site, be sure to add alt text that describes the photo and includes your keyword(s).

ALT text is primarily used as a way to describe the photo for someone who can’t see it, whether it’s due to the photo’s failure to load or a user with a visual impairment.

Note: The visually impaired use screen readers to help them understand the context, so please keep that in mind and don’t just use this as an opportunity to shove your keyword in. The best practice is to describe the photo for web accessibility purposes.

What I will say though is that if an image is truly relevant to your post, the keyword should fit naturally in the description. Try to add at least one ALT description with a keyword (note: it is not necessarily better if all of your images mention it).

5. Add internal and external links to relevant sources.

Whenever possible, add an internal link to another page that goes deeper on a term or idea.

Whenever you don’t have an internal link that explains something, add an external link. Google loves when you tag trusted websites like “Investopedia” or “TheKnot.com” or another high ranking website (3–4 links should be plenty).

It shows you’ve gone the extra mile to provide valuable information and have put in the work to back yourself up (so Google will trust you more).

6. Share the blog post on social media.

Shares show engagement/interest in your page and add credibility. Google loves when content is “worthy” of shares, so it uses that as a metric to decide if your content should rank or not.

You can guarantee it gets shared by sharing it yourself — send it out as a tweet or a Facebook post to add your own splash of credibility.

7. The URL slug.

There are two parts to your URL. The first chunk, (www.yourwebsitehere.com/) is your domain, and the second chunk, known as the slug, is the part after the “/“ (so, yourwebsitehere.com/aboutmycompany is an example).

Using your keywords in the slug will help google immediately recognize the purpose/keyword of the page. An unrelated or less descriptive slug, while great for memory purposes, is not as helpful for the Google bots.

8. Optimize page speed.

If it takes a long time for a page to load, most people will click away before they get there. This click away rate is called the “bounce” rate, and if yours is high, Google will frown on that.

So it’s a good idea to test your page speed and optimize regularly. (Here’s a free tool for you that will let you test on mobile & desktop: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/).

Google has been known to rank mobile-friendly sites much higher lately (because we’ve begun searching primarily on our phones), so that is something to keep in mind moving forward.

What SEO tactics would you add to this list?