How to SEO Your Blog Post

1. Alternative Text in the Images in Your Post

Also known as Image Alt Text, alt text is the written copy that appears in place of an image on a webpage if the image fails to load on a user’s screen. This text helps screen-reading tools describe images to visually impaired readers and allows search engines to better crawl and rank your website.

How Alt Text Helps to Boost SEO

Having alt text in your photos can help to boost SEO by providing another source of organic traffic. With Google’s SERP Search Engine Results Page providing image search together with text search, it will only be beneficial when you provide more search options for Google. 

Try this: Today it is not as simple as a blue hyperlinked text results. We can do better by having images as hyperlinked search results. 

How to add Alt Text to your Images

Click on the image after adding it into your blog post. Under Settings >> Block >> You should see a text box where you can add in your Alt Text.

Best Practises of Alt Text

Be specific and concise when describing the image. Include keywords or hyperlinks to bring visitors to your site.

2. Meta Description Tag

A Meta Description Tag is text that describes a page’s content. They tell the search engines what the page is about. 

How Meta Descriptions Tag Helps to Boost SEO

Search engines use meta tags to read the page. They can use meta tags to display snippets of information on the SERP search engine results page. By adding them into your articles, it allows both search engines and readers to understand what your site is about and entice readers to visit.

How to add Meta Descriptions Tag to your Post?

Download All In One SEO Pack plugin on WordPress >> Install >> Activate

To enable the Meta Keywords, go to All in One SEO plug in on the left panel >> General Settings >> Under Keyword Settings Section >> Enable the Use Keywords option >> Save settings by clicking Update Options

The place to insert the meta description tag is found at the bottom of every blog post under ‘Description’.

Best Practises of Meta Descriptions Tag

Keep to 160 words. Users will read the meta description and determine if they are going to click on your site. Google bots are going to use this to understand what your page is about and use it to rank for the keywords and search phrases. Don’t just list keywords here. Create a meaningful sentence or two that will entice the visitor to click next.

3. Link to other Posts

When external websites link to you, similarly, when you link to external websites. External links have more ranking power than internal links. However, you should still link internally whenever relevant.

How Linking helps to Boost SEO

For external links, Google sees them as third party votes. This is the Domain Authority (DA) that Moz has mentioned in their blog posts. The more external linkage that your website has from others, the higher up the search results Google will rank you.

How to add Linkage to your Post?

Requests for collaboration with other content creators, guest blogging to gain exposure and backlinks to your website. That being said, ensure you do not link to spammy websites which Google might associate your site to be spam as well.

Best Practises for Linking

Check if your site has broken links using this Broken Link Checker by Ahrefs. Also, have at least one regular, text-based hyperlink to every page on your site.

READ: How to Increase your Domain Authority

4. Ideal Blog Post Title Length

Headlines between 8 and 14 words were shared the most on social media, which works out to about 60 characters.

How Having the Ideal Blog Post Title Helps to Boost SEO

With a concise, short title, readers can easily discern the content of the post at first glance. 

Best Practises for Blog Post

Research using Keyword Planner, Wordtracker or Answer the Public to see what people are searching for online and the volume of searches. Google Search is another free and simple tool for keyword suggestions. These results are local which means you might get different set of suggestions when you perform a Google search at another location. This guide to Google Search Features will help you to leverage Google’s best features to drive traffic to your site.

Include one or two long tail keywords to target a specific audience and gain conversion because of the high chance the readers are searching for such specific phrases is because they already know what they want which increase the conversion rate.

When you have a long title for your article, try to get your keyword in the beginning since it might get cut off by Google’s SERP search engine results page toward the end, which can impact the page’s rankings.

No keyword stuffing and clickbait title please. As a user myself, this is plain annoying and readers would not want to visit your site again once they realise that it is a gimmick. 

READ: Ultimate Blogger 101: How to get Blog Readership with your Content

5. URL Structure – Best Practises

Include keywords in URL. Do not keyword stuff the URL as it will look spammy.

Remove stop words such as ‘the’, ‘a’, ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘but’. But if the URL makes sense to include them then do so.

Ensure URL is ‘readable’ by humans.

Example

https://example.com/content

versus

https://example.com/content/?cid=7078/id=22748&cm_sp=us_hdr-_-bed-%26-bath-_-22748_quilts-%26-bedspreads_COL1

Ensure there are no dates in URL so article does not appear stale.

Hyphens and underscores are the preferred word separators. Do not use spaces, because the URL will appear as %20 which affects the readability of the URL.

Perishable Press has list of safe and unsafe characters in URL. I have added a snippet of the safe characters that can be included in URL.

Shorter URL is better than longer URL because it is easier to copy paste, share on social media and embed.

6. Include Categories and Tags

As quoted from WPBeginner, Categories are meant for broad grouping of your posts. Think of these as general topics or the table of contents for your site. Categories are there to help identify what your blog is really about. It is to assist readers finding the right type of content on your site. Categories are hierarchical, so you can sub-categories.

Tags are meant to describe specific details of your posts. Think of these as your site’s index words. They are the micro-data that you can use to micro-categorize your content. Tags are not hierarchical.

You must categorize your post. However, you are not required to add any tags. 

How Adding Tags and Categories Help to Boost SEO and Best Practises

Tags and categories can help create that structure, allowing people to easily find posts that interest them.

However, you should not be adding too many tags. Find a common denominator for the posts you are writing about to help users find related posts and to help Google understand what this page is about. Include broad, popular tags that people usually search for and few specific tags.

Heading Tags

Heading tags to appear in order on your page and to only have one heading one tag. Avoid using Heading 1 Tag to say things such as “About Us”. Instead, focus on the core topic for that page.

Last but not least…

Place Keywords in Titles, Sub-heads, Opening Paragraphs, URL, Images and Meta Description Tags

I can never emphasis on the importance of keywords. Include one or two key words and long tail keywords in your post.

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