If you are a blogger, SEO or Search Engine Optimization is not a new word to you but if you’re just a starter, keep in mind, SEO is the only way for being friendly to search engines. Optimizing your blog with these ways will make your blog reach in first of search results and will help you get more traffic as well. We will be telling you the best SEO tricks to do on your blog with the 2017 search engine guidelines. Now we can discuss some common search engine optimization tricks to do on your blog.
What is SEO?
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process making a web page easy to crawl by search engines like Google, Bing etc. That was just a one-sentence definition, we can talk about How it helps your blog and How to do it.
SEO is done on websites or blog to get a seat in search engine results, just like we book a ticket to watch a movie, we are making our blog to get a seat in search results. Making a blog or website and publishing it will not help you to get traffic and without traffic, what is the use of a blog. To optimize your blog we are not going to make it look beautiful because of the content matters. We can discuss How it helps your blog.
How SEO helps your blog?
SEO could make your blog search engine friendly. How to do it? We are going to talk about it. When we search anything on Google, for example: “How to create a blog?” we will get many results, as a common activity, what we do is clicking the first result as we think that it is the best content. Refer to the screenshot below:
As you can see in the above screenshot, there are millions of results on this topic and it is a fact that we won’t check all of them. We naturally click on the first result as we think it is the best content, if you’re a blogger, you will definitely need your post appear at the top in search results. In the above screenshot, there are many results. The first one is having better SEO. How to do SEO on your blog, let’s discuss it now.
How to do SEO on your blog?
There are many ways to optimize your blog and it’s simple as lifting a feather. Let us introduce some of the most common SEO tricks and tactics to do on your blog.
1. Elegant Theme
Themes play a major role in SEO. If it is a clean and good looking theme, it could help your blog to be optimized easily as the theme, it will support monetization. You also want to make sure that the source code is well coded.
2. Source Code Pattern
The source code of your blog plays a major role in SEO. It must be well coded, by making it child by child pattern. Here is an example.
Original Source Code Pattern:
<main>
<child>
<sub-child>
</sub-child>
</child>
</main>
Optimized Source Code Pattern:
<main>
<child>
<sub-child>
</sub-child>
</child>
</main>
As you can see in the above example, the original code was just entered line by line and the optimized one was entered in a pattern. This helps search engines to crawl your blog easily.
2. Meta Tags
This is the most important part of SEO. There are many meta tags to use but we will tell you the most important tags.
Meta Description Tag: This defines your blog with just 160 characters. You want to write a description for your blog within 160 characters. A Meta Description Tag will look like this and it goes in the “<head>” section of your blog’s source code
Example: <meta name=”description” content=”a description for your blog which must not exceed 160 characters” />
Meta Keywords Tag: These are words which will describe the content on your blog. The keywords you enter must be relevant to the content of your blog because too many keywords and irrelevant keywords will make your blog penalized by search engines. 10 is the recommended amount of keywords to use for your blog.
Example: <meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, keyword4, keyword5″ />
3. A Sitemap for your blog
A Sitemap is a page which will contain each and every content of your blogs like posts, pages, and much more. It is published to make it easier for search engines to crawl your blog. A sitemap of a blog or website is like this: www.YourBlogDomain.com/sitemap.xml.
To submit a sitemap for your blog, you will have to sign up for Google Search Console (Webmaster Tools By Google) and add your site, then submit a sitemap to your blog. This will make your blog index faster on search engines.
4. Robots.txt for your blog
Robots.txt is the configuration for your blog on how your blog needs to be indexed by search engines. A Robots.txt will contain the sitemap page link and the other detailed information about your blog. A Robots.txt of a blog or website is like this: www.YourBlogDomain.com/robots.txt.
To submit a Robots.txt for your blog, you will have to sign up for Google Search Console and add your site, then go to Crawl>Robots.txt and click submit or update. A Robots.txt must require a sitemap on your blog.
5. Custom Redirection for broken links
If you find any broken links of your blog indexed by search engines, set a custom redirection to the desired page of your blog or homepage. People visiting those links will be redirected to the desired page.
6. Writing content worthy and keyword filled blog posts
When you are ready to write a blog post do a research on the topic. You will definitely find some results which explain a lot about the same topic which you are going to publish. Write all the titles of the blog post you saw on the first page of search results. The title of your post should cover almost all the highlighted keywords of those blog posts.
Your post must contain the minimum of 600-900 words if it is a topic which is trending worldwide or a topic which are mostly searched.
7. Adding the right Tags or Labels
Tags or Labels are used in a blog post to define what’s the blog post about and which category it belongs to. For example For this post, we cover the Best SEO Tricks so we can add tags like SEO & Tricks. Use relevant tags according to your topic.
8. Using rel=”nofollow” for external links
If you’re writing a blog post, it is a fact that you will have to insert some links for external reference which might be from Wikipedia or any other sources on the Internet. If you’re inserting an external link ( a link which is not from your blog) in your blog post which is not with nofollow attribute, it will index the external link you inserted and will affect your blog in SEO.
Adding nofollow attribute: <a href=”https://www.google.com/” rel=”nofollow”>External Link</a> This external link with nofollow attribute will not be indexed by search engines because nofollow attribute is to make the search engines not to index the link you have inserted.
You only have to use nofollow attribute if it is an external link. You can insert a link to your own blog without nofollow attribute. It will not affect the SEO of your blog.
9. Placing JavaScripts at the end of your blog’s source code
JavaScripts will make a web page load slower and it will affect your blog’s SEO as search engines serve fast loading and responsive web pages on search results.
JavaScripts or JS starts with the tag <script>. Moving those codes to the end of your blog’s source code that is before “</body>” tag will help your blog in loading speed as well as for SEO.
Note: Don’t move JavaScript codes provided from Google services like Analytics, and AdSense to anywhere of your source code, keep it on the top as it needs to be indexed.
10. Using tools useful for blogging
Some good tools for bloggers:
- SEMrush: To find good keywords, get tips, and maintaining backlinks.
- Grammarly: To write mistake free contents by correcting grammar and spelling mistakes (Read Grammarly Review).
- SEO Profiler: To know about your blog’s SEO stats and get tips to get more SEO features.
11. Image SEO
Image or picture you use in a blog post plays a major role in the part of SEO of your blog. An Image can describe what’s the blog post is about. We can understand it if the picture is relevant to the topic. How can search engines understand? That’s why there are attributes called “alt text” and “title”.
Adding alt text and title attribute:
If you are inserting an image in your blog post, go to its HTML and add these highlighted attributes:
<img src=”image-link” alt=”description for the image” title=”what is the picture about”>
JPEG is the best extension for an image to be inserted in a blog post.
12. Adding a Conclusion to your blog post
Adding a summary or conclusion will make readers understand the whole thing about the post at a glance. The conclusion must be descriptive and need to wrap the whole thing in a 1 or 2 paragraph.
13. Permalinks of blog posts
A permalink must describe the post and include keywords. Permalinks are the ones mostly indexed by search engines to crawl your blog. Make it small and efficient.
14. Do not do plagiarism or copying
Plagiarism is the way of changing a copied content to convince that the source is actually by the plagiarist. Copying contents from other internet sources will affect your blog. Search engines can understand the content is copied or plagiarised. Copying contents from other internet sources often lead to penalization of your blog from search engines.
15. Do not include Shortened Links or links which redirects to Ad pages
Using Shortened Links is a good way to earn money. It is considered as a spam by search engines. You can use the nofollow attribute described above to prevent this issue. Using shortened links will make people feel unsatisfied with your blog and it is not user-friendly.
Conclusion
I recommend you to use these tricks and tactics on your blog. I guarantee that it will make your blog reach the top of search engines. You have any doubt? Please feel free to use the comment section, we are here to help you :).