A Beginner’s Guide To SEO

If you’re a blogger there is a good chance you’ve heard of SEO. Or search engine optimisation. If you’re anything like me you probably know about SEO but have no idea where or how to get started with implementing it on your blog. Today I am going to share a few simple ways I have improved the overall SEO on my blog.

WHAT IS SEO

SEO (search engine optimisation) is the process of gaining organic traffic from search engines. So say someone searched for Muji Planner review found my link and ended up on my blog. That was the result of SEO.

Search engine rankings are quite complicated but essentially the most useful results are shown first when you use a search engine. You can write content in a particular niche and if Google (or other search engines) think that content is useful, it will be shown higher in the search results for keywords related to that niche.

There are a number of small changes you can make to how to write blog posts to improve your SEO and make them rank higher in search results.

HOW CAN YOU IMPROVE YOUR SEO

KEYWORDS

Keywords are the things which make it possible for a user to find your post when using a search engine. Like I mentioned previously.  If someone searched for Muji planner 2018 they might come across my review. This means you need to decide on specific keywords for each post, something that a user might search for in order to find information on the topic you’re writing about.

Once you’ve got that keyword you need to include it somehow in the first paragraph of your post and then a few more times throughout the post. You need to make sure you include the keyword enough times without spamming them.

MEANINGFUL TITLE

Similarly, once you’ve worked out the keywords for a post they need to be in the title of the post. This is also what helps someone find a page on the topic they are searching for. For example, I wrote a post about how I was frustrated by my chronic illness, however I titled it as Annoyed. This meant it was very hard for that page to rank because the search engines didn’t know what the page was about. If I had named it something like ‘frustrated by my chronic illness’ it would have been much easier to find.

ALT TAGS

The alt attribute on an image tag is commonly used by search engines to find out what is on the image. It is also commonly used by screen readers for the visually impaired. Not all screen readers will use the alt tag, some use the head tag. So it’s a good idea to fill out both when you are adding images to blog posts. By accurately describing what an image contains people who are visually impaired will know what the image is for and search engines will be able to find it.

INTERNAL LINKS

Search engines show pages by the order of importance. You can let a search engine know how important a web page is by adding links pointing to it. Links from other domains will help but you can also add internal links from other pages on your own domain.

For example on my post about choosing a notebook I added links to other posts about bullet journaling. This way the search engine can find similar pages on my website about that one topic. It also has the added advantage of keeping users on my blog for longer. By adding links inside my posts readers are more likely to click on those links and read other posts on my blog.

FINALLY

Working on your SEO isn’t guaranteed to make your blog more popular. However it will make it easier to find your posts on a specific topic. It should also increase your domain authority, meaning google is more likely to rank your domain higher in the search engine results. This will also make it more likely people will read your posts. But remember posting consistently will also help with this.

If you’re running a self-hosted blog there are a number of plugins you can use to help with SEO. The one I am using is called Yoast. This takes the hassle out of making sure every post is good from an SEO point of view. If you’ve read this post and still don’t really understand SEO I recommend installing Yoast. This will do all the hard work for you.