There are thousands of new blogs launched everyday on different topics and some of them rank very high on search engines but others do not get good popularity even after many years. This is where you realize the power of search engine optimization for blogs to drive more organic traffic for free.
I am not SEO expert at all but in this post I am sharing 11 SEO tips for blogs that I am following and getting good result from search engines. There is always a room for improvement so I will keep sharing more tips as I learn new and useful SEO techniques.
1. Write Title Tags with Two Audiences in Mind
For any blog post your titles are very important. Short, on-topic and catchy topics are more impressive and get attention than long titles. But you can make both audiences happy (real visitors and search engines). What I usually do is make a short title for site visitors and using WordPress SEO plugin I write a long title with keywords for search engines.
2. Smart-Linking
There is a fine line between overlinking and underlinking. When you link any blog or site from your post link it carefully, for example if you are quoting something from wikipedia site and linking to wikipedia main page, it is not really useful for your readers but if you link to the page from where you quoted the content then it will be useful.
3. Go Beyond Text in Posts
It is a proven fact that people do not like to “read” more on internet but they prefer images more. If your post contain no images but line after line of text then don’t expect much response from your readers. Use as many images as you can but only if they are related to the content.
4. Smart URLs
Make your blog’s URL search engine friendly, for example the blog post URL should be www.inspirefusion.com/wordpress-seo-tips/ and should not be like this www.inspirefusion.com/?p=340. The short URLs still get indexed and rank but they are not user / search engine friendly.
5. Don’t Use Reduntant Links
Some may think that increasing the value of a particular page involves repeatedly linking to the same page from another page. Search engines will only count the first instance of that link, so there is no need to repeat links. In addition, this is a poor practice that will confuse your users. ~ via ~
6. Descriptive alt Text For Images
When using image(s) it is good practise to write descriptive alt text. Because search engines can’t see images and they read alt text so you should write short and keyword-rich alt text for images.
7. Deep Linking To Older Posts
Deep linking is very good and effective technique to promote your old blog posts related to the new post you are writing. Deep links are basically the links point to your inner pages / posts. You should be carefully linking to inner posts / pages because only relevant posts linking will do good for you, irrelevant linking will confuse your site visitors.
8. Do Not stuff
When using images and writing alt text don’t throw too many keywords in “alt” and “title”. Just write short and relevant keyword that explain to the search engines what the image is all about.
9. Generate an XML Sitemap For Search Engines
An XML Sitemap is a listing of all the pages and posts on your website. This helps the search engine crawlers get a machine-readable structure of your websites. Having a properly structured sitemap has great benefits in the search engines.
Thanks to the massive amount of plugins, generating a sitemap with WordPress is super easy. I suggest using the XML Sitemaps.
This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap that will assist search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com in more extensively and accurately indexing your posts and pages. The plugin supports various WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally, it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content by pinging them. ~ via ~
10. Smart Filenames For Images
This is very important but often underestimated technique to gain search engine popularity. For example you are posting something about “Titanic Movie” and have image(s) related to the topic then give your images filenames like “Titanic.jpg, Titanicmovie.jpg” not like t1.jpg and t2.jpg. The filename should tell easily what the image is all about. The most related keywords in the image filenames really help you gaining SEO popularity.
11. Smart Reblogging
Reblogging of useful and informative articles is very common where one blogger puglish a post and give credit to the original author, but when you reblog something you should understand that the title, content, images and other details like keywords and description has already indexed and ranked for the original author so if you want to rank high for the same topic you should re-write the content in your own words with more attention to SEO techniques I mentioned above.
I hope you find these tips useful and after following these tips you will get positive results from search engines. If you know some more tips you are most welcome to leave comment and share your tip(s).
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some very simple yet usefull seo tips! i do actually apply most of them, but there were certainly some little things i can still use