10 Search Engine Optimization Tips for Bloggers

Key Takeaways

• The quality of content is important
• Write based on anticipated keywords
• Provide good titles
• Use keywords effectively
• Link to your own posts
• Link to your blog from outside sources
• Build a following of consistent readers
• Make your content engaging
• Load speed impacts your SEO
• Optimize for mobile viewers

For a more in-depth SEO optimization, be sure to check out our blog: How to Optimize Your Website for Search Engine Optimization, where we dig deeper into SEO and how SEO is factored. The purposes of this article is to focus on blogging, as creating new content is the best way to raise your SEO rank. You might also be interested in knowing why Search Engines work the way they do.

1. Produce good Blog Content

The most crucial element in search engine optimization for blogs is the caliber of the material you produce. A reader who reads helpful content will frequently want to share it with others. Of course, they do this by sharing the post's link, and frequently they'll do it in a way that boosts your search rankings (i.e. on social media, or their own blog).

Blog entries should offer current data, another indirect SEO ranking element. Visitors receive current and reliable information thanks to new data, which improves the reading experience. By including a link to a reliable website with authentic, current information, you are signaling to a search engine that this website is beneficial and pertinent to your visitors. Additionally, you are informing the search engine that the content you post is somehow connected to this kind of data. Your viewers will grow to value the material over time, which may be seen in other metrics like higher time on page or a reduced bounce rate.

2. Write Content based on anticipated keywords

Every time you create an article, you should think about the keywords that readers might use to find that kind of material in search engines. You can position yourself for that search in a terrific way once you know what words they're using. If you don't start off with a plan, keyword research can be a challenging endeavor to take on. As a result, I advise beginning with the subjects your blog will cover before broadening or narrowing your focus from there.

It's not necessary (or recommended) to stuff your posts with keywords in order to optimize them for search engines. Search engines view this as keyword stuffing (see Why do Search Engines Work the Way they do?), which damages your SEO. It also doesn't provide for a positive reader experience, which search engines now emphasize as a ranking factor (see How to Optimize your Website for Search Engines) to make sure you're meeting your visitors' needs. As a result, you should incorporate keywords into your text without making them seem forced or out of place.

Our article: Search Engine Optimization and Core Web Vitals presents a great section on Creating Good Content that Utilizes keywords that you might find useful as you think about the best way to incorporate keywords into your content.

3. Provide an effective Blog title

The first thing a reader sees when they come across your article is the title of your blog post, which has a significant impact on whether they click or scroll down. A compelling title grabs the reader's attention by using information, posing a query, or arousing curiosity.

Powerful, emotional, unusual, and common words are characteristics of a captivating headline. When used in the appropriate combination, the words in the blog title will draw people in and keep them reading. When it comes to titles, there are several considerations. Make sure to use appropriate titles because Google pays close attention to them. Include the post's title in the title tags on your blog's back end. This is not only good practice, it's imperative to success.

Don't use your blog name in the title tags of individual entries if you're only considering SEO. This muddles your keywords. However, if branding is more important to you, using your blog's name in the title tags can be a good idea. Incorporate the keywords you chose into the headline of your post as well. In a title, the words you use first usually have more impact than the words you use afterwards.

4. Use Keywords Effectively throughout your blog

Include the keywords you chose in point #2 in your post as well. You must employ that term or phrase if you want Google to rank you for it. Use the words in your post's subheadings (where possible, use h tags), the text itself, the alt tags of your photographs, etc. Avoid going off subject, but do incorporate the terms where they organically occur in the post.

Our article: Search Engine Optimization and Core Web Vitals presents an excellent section on SEO Keyword research that will help you as you seek to find good quality keywords to bolster your efforts. It presents 3 steps to developing this list that may be particularly helpful.

In the headers and all through the body of your blog post, use keywords at a natural rate. Avoid overdoing it to avoid getting penalized for keyword stuffing. It's likely that you will consider how to use your keywords in your post before you begin creating a new blog post. That's a good notion, however it shouldn't be your exclusive or even main priority.

Your audience should always come first when you're writing content, not how many times you can cram a keyword or keyword phrase in there. Focus on being kind and responding to any queries that your customer may have had before finding your post. By doing this, you will inherently optimize for crucial keywords.

5. Link your own Blog posts

Both internal links from your blog and links from other websites are effective ways to raise the ranks of your website. When appropriate, interlink your posts to let readers know where they can get more information on the subject, but you should also think about linking to important blog entries from other locations.

When you link your other posts in the body of any relevant content, search engines will find yet another point of entry to your posts. This means that site crawlers will identify the post and any updates you provide to them more quickly. As a result, you may experience an increase in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) of those posts.

6. Find ways to link to your posts from outside

While important for SEO, links from other websites to yours can be challenging to obtain. Start establishing links from other websites you own or are active on to your blog. Although some of them (like on Twitter) have no-follow tags, they are all potentially effective ways for visitors to access your site, and some of them will aid in SEO.

Instead of becoming concerned with obtaining connections, focus on generating excellent content, and the links will usually appear in due course. But if you've published a fantastic article that you believe will be pertinent to another blog, don't be hesitant to let that blogger or website owner know about it; they could choose to link up.

Be sure to note the posts that are effective at attracting links from other websites. By doing this, you can pick up a lot of knowledge about creating linkable content and you can even discover a method that consistently produces quality material.

7. Build a following of consistent readers to increase your listing

The more readers you have, the more probable it is that new readers will discover your site. On a blog, there is a particular "snowballing" phenomenon that develops over time. As you get viewers, momentum rises as they recommend your site to others in their network. They mention you in blogs, emails, links, bookmarks, and search engine recommendations. They also link to you.

Even if not all of this contributes to SEO, some of it does, and its accumulation over time undoubtedly helps to increase both organic and search traffic. What I'm trying to imply is that you should focus on getting readers in general rather than just SEO specifically. All of it counts.

8. Keep your content engaging

Although dwell time is an indirect ranking element for Google, it's crucial to the user experience, and we all know that when it comes to SEO, user experience is king. The amount of time a reader spends on a page of your blog site is known as dwell time. The period of time between a visitor's click and when they leave your website is referred to as dwell time. This indicator infers from reader engagement with your content how valuable it is to search engines like Google. It seems sense that the content will be more pertinent to them the longer they are on the website.

This statistic is an indirect signal for SEO, though, because it is wholly arbitrary. The algorithms used by search engines are unaware of your content strategy. Your blog can be geared at quick reads that only require a few minutes. For the best reader experience and to ensure that readers spend as little time on the page as possible, you might also provide essential information at the beginning of your blog entries. Therefore, even if dwell duration can have an impact on SEO, if it doesn't make sense for your content strategy, don't distort your article to influence this.

9. Page load speed impacts your SEO

Overuse of plugins and unnecessary coding can both slow down blog sites. Your pages can load more quickly by removing unnecessary code, which can increase page performance. Page speed is threatened by plugins that have an impact on your site's front end, and chances are you can delete more of these plugins than you think to speed up your entire site.

Additionally, page speed affects dwell time as described in point #8 above, since visitors are less inclined to wait for a website to load slowly. We at Wallaby Designs don't use page builders, or plugins, so this is never an issue with any sites we build. What we build, we build for speed, so you can be sure that your page speed will always be fast.

10. Optimize your content for mobile viewers

Approximately 60% of all internet users are browsing on mobile. To assist mobile visitors, it is important to write your content such that it is easily viewable by mobile audiences. While this is not entirely a blogging issue, it's worth mentioning as some content you write may be impacted by these suggestions. Some excellent ways to optimize your site and blog for mobile viewers may consist of some of the following:

Resize graphics, pictures, and other content to fit various viewports or display screens (phone, tablet, desktop). An image that is larger than the viewport, for instance, might need the viewer to scroll horizontally in order to see the entire image. You would need to adjust the image to fit inside the viewport in order to prevent these situations. 

To correctly scale media to fit device characteristics, employ media query syntax, or rules used to set distinct style rules for different media devices, through the back end of your website. If this syntax is used properly, it creates a responsive experience, which boosts the search ranking of your website by assisting in the implementation of a mobile-friendly website.