If you have a website or blog, it is likely that you have already heard about the importance of SEO. But do you really know how to optimize your publications to make them more search engine friendly? Many people do not know and are not taking advantage of many advantages.
One thing is certain: the success of SEO is not a phenomenon that happens overnight, however, a good dose of patience and a simple knowledge of its techniques will be enough to take flight and start increasing your traffic.
Join us for this quick guide and discover the basics of SEO for blogs!
Investigate keywords
SEO is extremely important for digital marketing professionals, and especially for fans of content marketing. When you optimize your blog, you are making it more visible to people who are inserting terms associated with the topics addressed by search engines. And if everything starts with the search for keywords in the engines, there is no way to start an SEO strategy without thinking about them.
The keywords you must choose for the contents of your website are those that refer to the search criteria that your target audience uses to find information. Therefore, to investigate them thoroughly and work your positioning based on them is super important.
One of the factors to choose your keyword is to know your monthly search volume as well as the variation of the search over time. In this way, you discover if it is worthwhile, or not, to write an entire article on the subject. To find this information, there are some tools:
Keyword tools
- Ubersuggest
- SEMrush
- Keyword Tool
- Google Keyword Planner
Include keywords strategically
Optimizing your publication is not about repeating as many keywords as possible, in fact, this could even hurt you, given that search engines consider this type of excess a bad practice for positioning. That is, they take it as a cheating act to classify you highly in organic searches.
In addition, this also does not contribute to a good reading experience – a classification factor that the engines prioritize to ensure that you are responding to the intention of your visitors.
Therefore, you must use the keywords in your content in a way that does not seem artificial or forced.
How and where to apply it?
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- Once in the main title
- At least one or two subtitles
- At least 3 times in the body of the article
- Once in the URL
- At least once in the alt text of an image
- Once in the meta description
- Marked at least once in ” bold ” or ” italic “
Optimize the title
You already know that the keyword must be part of the title (H1) of your publication, however, there are other practices that optimize it even more and help searchers find the article more easily are:
- Include the keyword, preferably, the more to the left the better
- Make the reader aware of your intention. For example, “How to choose”, “Tips for …”, “Learn to …”
- Do not exceed 65 characters (including spaces), 55 being the “ideal” number of characters. This does not mean that your article will not be indexed if you exceed this limit, but it will be automatically cut by Google
- Do not use too many commas
Make friendly URLs
The structure of the URL of your website should facilitate the understanding of the content that the reader will find in it. For example, if you have a blog that talks about online shopping, you can have these two types of content incorporated in specific URLs: click
This makes your reader understand that there are smaller sections, called subdirectories, within your blog.
The same applies in publications if you have an article on “How to make effective advertising?”, The structure of the most appropriate URL would be tublog.com/publicidad/como-hacer-publicidad-efectiva.
For the URL of a publication, the indicated thing is to make it as short as possible (without losing its meaning) and to contain the main keyword.
Add an attractive meta description
The meta description is an HTML code tag that summarizes the topic you will talk about in your article. As a summary, it should be interesting and pleasant, so call the user to click on the link and access the site. In Google, it is the text shown in the second and third lines of the search results, just below the title.
Google has already confirmed that the content of the meta description does not influence the positioning, however, a well written and attractive description contributes to the increase in the click rate, so it is important to take it into account.
What to consider?
- Write a meta description with a maximum of 160 characters (it is the space that Google delimits so that it does not show with cuts)
- Include the keyword naturally (although it does not influence the ranking, visually tend to stand out in bold when the user does the search)
- Encourage an action (“Click here to find out more”, “Try it for free”, etc.)
Optimize the alt text of the images
Alt text is a description attribute that is added in the HTML code of an image but does not be scared, you do not need to be an expert in programming to do it, most platforms already have this text field available.
Whenever you upload an image in your publication, be sure to include the keyword in the file name and a brief description in the alternative text related to its context – the search engines use alt text to identify what the image is about.
This not only helps your SEO, but also to people with visual disabilities since the screen reader reads and recites the alternative text to the user, and in case of broken images, if the image does not appear in the blog, the alt text instead.
Divide the content into topics
The subtitles are not only used to organize your text and facilitate the reading of the visitor.
The search engines take into account the topics and subtopics that you use in your text to categorize your content and identify what is the subject of your publication.
How to do it effectively?
- Include the keyword in at least one topic or subtopic
- Try to use up to H3
- Do not repeat texts in different subtitles
- Make short paragraphs with a maximum of 300 words
Have external and internal links
External links – links that other pages generate in your content and point to yours – serve to show the search engines that you are reliable and relevant, after all, if another website recommends you, it means that you are a great reference.
The best way to achieve external links is looking for other colleagues to share your links in their own articles or making guest posts (write articles in another blog that is not yours).
On the other hand, we have internal links, which are much easier to apply. The internal link is to point to a page of your own blog within your article. This tells search engines that that page is the most important one in your website/blog.
This practice also serves to increase the time spent by visitors on your page, making them browse other of your relevant content.
Advice on the internal link
- Do not abuse it so as not to damage the scannability of your article
- Use words or phrases that actually describe the article instead of “click here” or “access this article”
- When publishing a new article, check old content and see if you can link it in some, especially those that have achieved popularity
Verify if you are compatible with mobile devices
Did you know that more and more people use search engines through their mobile phones instead of the computer?
And for all searches done on smartphones, Google shows the optimized results for mobile first.
This means that the search engine strongly favors a mobile-friendly website, so if you are not, you are probably losing many positions.
By applying the customizable web design on your site you can also unify your URL, without the need to have one for computer and another for the cell phone. This helps your SEO since it centralizes the power gained with the links and allows Google to recognize the value of your publications more easily.
All these simple SEO tips credit goes to the marketing & research specialist team of UK Dissertations, you can increase the ranking of your website or blog in the search engines, your web traffi, and your conversion rate. Start then to incorporate the techniques in your page, without a doubt you will have excellent results.