5 ON PAGE SEO TIPS FOR BLOGGERS
iPad Mini Case c/o Case Hut | Canon 40mm Pancake Lens | Glasses – Scarlett of Soho
An SEO Introduction For Beginners..
As I have been working full-time within the world of SEO and Content for the past four years, I have been wanting to share with you for some time, an insight into my job and tips on how you can get your blog found in the Search Engines.
In 2015 I am hoping to be able to set more time aside to create some blogging and SEO tips for all of you lovely lot, so if there is any particular topic you would like me to write about, then please do let me know in the comments section below.
I thought that I would start off today with a mini introduction into the world of SEO – as there are a total of over 200 factors that will determine where you rank in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), otherwise known as Google Search – so rather than scare you all with colossal amounts of information I thought I would start with five tips that you should currently be looking to implement on each blog page to make sure that they are SEO optimised in order to increase your blog’s search visibility, so hopefully some of you will find these five SEO tips for beginners useful…
1. Keywords
Keywords are the target terms that you would like your site to show up for in the Search Engine Results. For example, if you sold ‘red shoes’ you would want your website to show up for people entering the search term ‘red shoes’ into Google. So, the best place to start is my researching what keywords you want to reach your target audience via. My tool of preference to help with this the Google Keyword Planner Tool.
Gone are the days when people used to stuff as many keywords as possible into their web-pages to show up for those terms in search. As SEO is becoming more ‘clean’ Keywords still hold their importance but should not be over-used. The trick is to make your content user friendly whilst also bearing Search Engine Spiders in mind. With that said, you should have some target keywords for your website – e.g. Fashion Blog or Beauty Blogger – and keyword / keyword synonyms should be used in on-page elements such as the Page Title, Meta-Description, Headings and Image Alt Text (which are all discussed below).
*Tip* When creating a new post I use the Google Keyword Planner Tool or Google Trends to determine what keyword/s to target for each new page. Take into account the ‘search volume’ and also competition per keyword, as the more competition there is, the harder it will be to rank for.
2. Title-Tags
Title-Tags are your page titles and these should be relevant to the content on the page. For best practice these should be unique per page and written with less than 70 characters (including spaces) to allow Google Search Engine Spiders to crawl your Titles effectively and this will also stop any of the page titles being cut off in the search engine results (SERPs).
If you are using Blogger as a CMS (content management system) the ‘Post-Title’ is the equivalent to your meta-title and if you are using WordPress then you can install the Yoast SEO plug in. Alternatively, if you are writing your page via HTML then your Title-Tags will be encased in the following code:
<head>
<title>Insert Page Title here</title>
</head>
*Tip* Try to somehow incorporate your target keywords for each post in your Page Title to encourage being found for that term in the search engine results.
3. Meta-Descriptions
A Meta-Description sums up the content on the page and describes this to Google and also how you would like the description to show in the SERPs. Each Meta-Description must describe the page in question – I would try to incorporate some keywords / keyword synonyms here – and must be unique to each page. For best practice meta-descriptions should be less than 160 characters (including spaces).
Again, if you are using blogger you can put this in the ‘Search Description’ box in the right hand bar and on WordPress the Yoast SEO Plug In will help you with this. For those working in HTML your Meta-Description will be encased in the following code:
<meta name=”description” content=”Insert Page Description here“>
*Tip* I try to incorporate keyword synonyms within my Meta-Descriptions alongside describing the elements of my outfit or beauty products used in a post.
4. Header Tags
Header Tags – or H Tags – define your HTML headings and size of text (depending on how your website template / design is set up). There are 6 H Tags in total, with H1 being the most important tag (also the biggest text) and H6 being the least important tag.
As a rule of thumb, each page should try to have just one H1 Tag (you can hear Google’s Matt Cutts views on this here), which will ideally be your Page Title, as it is seen as an important rankings factor as it tells Google what is on your page. Then, if you require more headings throughout your article I would recommend implementing H2 or H3 tags, depending on their importance
*Tip* This is probably why you will see me incorporate the items of clothing I am wearing in Titles (AKA my target keywords) as opposed to catchy/cool post titles, to help encourage my posts to be found by those who search for the item that I am wearing.
5. Alt (Image) Tags
Alt Tags refer to image Tags. Unless you have given you pictures an Image Alt Tag, Google Crawl Spiders will not know what your image depicts, as they cannot actually see these. Therefore, you need to give each image on your site an Alt Tag to describe what that image is.
*Tip* I have seen some top bloggers also tag their images with their target search keywords, such as ‘Fashion Blog’, ‘Street Style’ or ‘Fashion Blogger’
Thanks for reading my beginners introduction to on-page SEO, which I hope some of you have found useful?
For my next post in this series I was wanting to focus on ‘link building’ for both on and off-page methods (on-page being linking on your own site and off-page being anywhere other than your own URL), or I will split this into two posts. So please keep an eye out for my next SEO tips post and let me know if any of you have found the above useful for your own blog!
