Tips to Help your SEO

Blogging, it’s just sitting down, writing a post and hitting publish right? While that may be true for some, the reality for those of us who blog for a living is that it is so much more. What you don’t see is the hours we spend just crafting a single post, as we also have to make sure our content is seen and that not only includes sharing on social media but also learning the basics (if not more) of SEO (search engine optimisation).

Now I will never say I am expert in anything blogging, I learn new things every day, I do try and pass on things I have learnt via UK Bloggers, alongside some other amazing people and today I thought I would pass on some easy to do SEO tips.

Publish Quality Relevant Content

Last week I published a post on why your content isn’t that great. I think all bloggers are guilty of publishing content that isn’t their best. There are many reasons for this, perhaps it’s an off day, perhaps the topic isn’t something they are enthusiastic about (I know for me this is a big thing, if I don’t enjoy writing the post – it shows in my words) and sometimes we just forget the golden rule to proofread. Now we are never going to get it right 100% of the time, but if your content is littered with spelling and grammar errors, it is likely to cause issues in the long term with your searchability.

Also, make sure your content is relevant, I guess I am pretty lucky as here I can write about pretty much what I want, due to being “lifestyle”. However, if you have a niche-specific blog, going off-topic suddenly can cause issues.

Load Time

Did you know your load time is taken into account by some search engines? So it is always worth making sure your blog is loading as quickly as possible. I personally noticed a huge difference in load time when I switched hosts and had better caching installed. However, checking for errors in your coding and making sure everything is streamlined as possible can make a big difference.

Metadata

If you are working on WordPress you’ve most likely heard of Yoast (or similar plugins) and have them downloaded and work with the metadata of your posts. This can be harder to do on other platforms, but it is always worth finding out how you edit the metadata of both your website and singular posts. It is worth getting used to using; your title; a description and of course keywords within in a post to help search engines determine what you’re writing about. However be careful, don’t keyword cram posts as that can lead to them being ignored.

Ask an Expert

Like I said at the start, I’m no expert, I can only share what I have learned through muddling along. And sometimes you need to just call in the experts like click.co.uk and get them working their magic for you. Other websites such as enterprise SEO services can also be on hand to help you when needed. 

Submit a Sitemap

Sitemaps help search engines navigate your website, it’s basically a list of links, leading to all the important areas of your website. They don’t take too long to set up and submit but can make all the difference to your SEO.

Make Sure Your Website is Mobile Friendly

Google has stressed the importance of your website being mobile-friendly, it most definitely a part of their ranking mechanics.

This is just a small insight into some things you can do to help make your website be more SEO friendly. There are a whole host of other items to look into such as internal linking, growing natural links from others, use heading tags and more! So why not schedule a day to do some learning.

It is worth looking at this post on how to write a blog post for SEO if you are after more information. 

What is your top tip for making your website more SEO friendly?

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