7 Best Seo Practices for your Blog

As a new blogger, you want  your blog to be found. So as a new blogger you’ll want to become intimate with Google SEO.  SEO, search engine optimisation, ensures that you increase the chances of being found when people search for phrases that relate to your niche.  Here are some best SEO practises to follow to increase your chances of being listed by Google and other search engines.

1. URL Structure
2. Title
3. H1, H2, H3
4. Image & Image Optimisation
5. Integrated Keywords
6. Links In
7. Links Out

URL Structure

When you set up your blog, set it up to choose a descriptive URL for each blog post. Instead of a numerical URL like yourblog.com/123, advise your blog to include category names and post names.  Your post then looks like this: yourblog.com/allaboutwidges/basic-widget-guide.  Search engines read the URL as part of the process of determining what your page is about so will take the name of the URL into consideration.

Title

Choose titles that leverage keywords and this could help, too. Don’t stuff ten keywords into to your title or no one will want to click on it through search engine results and you’ll lose rankings quickly but think about slipping a relevant phrase in there to tell search engines what the title is so the search engines can match that title to specific queries.

H1, H2, H3

H1 is most important, H2 is of secondary importance, and so on when the search engines read the content in your blog posts.  H1 is the title of the overall page as it appears in search engine results pages. H2 is a good approach for tagging your subheadings. These tags also look slightly larger in text so aren’t just good for search engines, they’re good for readers, too, as they can scan the page to see what it’s about before determining whether or not they want to read it.

Images

Adding an image is a good thing for the reader. Tagging the image with keywords gives further weight to the topic at hand and search engines can’t see what’s in your image so the phrase you allocate to it will tell the search engine whether or not your image relates to your topic.

Keywords

Blog posts need to have more substance to them than just a sprinkling in of keywords but after you write a great blog post, take a look at some keyword research tools (such as the Google keyword tool) and see what phrases might be wise to integrate.

Links In & Links Out

Pointing links to your blog post could help it get noticed. Writing guest blogs with a byline leading back to your post with a link, social media links that point to your site, and getting honourable mentions from other sites can all help your cause.  Internal and authority links from within blog posts can also help your post get noticed by search engines, too. Linking to other internal content on your site as well as linking to known authority sites on your subject could gain your site more visibility, too.

SEO best practises are something that can help you increase the chances of your blog getting traffic to it.  Marry SEO with good content and you could see great success.