Stepping Up Your Blog Game: A beginners guide to SEO

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How SEO Saves Your Content from Oblivion

According to World Wide Web Size, there are currently 5.57 billion sites indexed on the internet. It is no surprise that there is strong competition between sites to stand out from the crowd and be seen by the appropriate and relevant audience.

You may have attempted to create a blog by designing an appealing site and publishing high-quality content. While these will set your site on a good foundation, you will have to apply technical tactics if you want to take your site to the next level. This will allow search engines like Google to deem your site as authoritative and rank it higher on Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for your niche and encourage organic page views and site visits. (Sildenafil)

What is SEO and why do you need it?

In short, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the practice you need to apply to your site in order to rank on SERPs. This increases the ‘readability’ of your site to Google’s algorithm.

The more tactical you are with your site, the easier it is for Google to crawl through your site and recognise it as an authoritative site within the relevant field.

SEO tactics you need to know

You will have to commit to SEO in order to maintain or improve your blog’s authority. Here are some SEO tactics to get you started:

Submitting XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap is a computer-friendly table of contents that reveals the hierarchy of your pages and allows the crawlers to identify essential information from your blog. You can get a copy of your XML sitemap from the SEO Yoast plugin and submit it to Google via the Google Search Console, allowing it to know exactly where to crawl.

Creating a user-friendly HTML Sitemap

Besides the XML sitemap, you would want to work on your HTML sitemap as well. Unlike the computer-friendly table of contents, the HTML sitemap is to ensure the site is reader-friendly.  It is a list that shows all the relevant pages in an easily readable format and acts as a guide to clarify your titles, headlines and contents.

Another helpful element would be to use ‘breadcrumbs’. By customising the tags of your post by using <Title> and <Description> can help the crawlers identify the main keywords on each page. Aim to use a similar range of keywords to help Google recognise what your site is about.

Writing SEO-friendly content

SEO-friendly copywriting is different from traditional copywriting. SEO-friendly writing will still involve the creativity and technicality of what you would normally write. However, there would be a stronger emphasis on the wordings of headings and the content. Make sure the headings are informative and relevant to the content of the post and use specific keywords in your post to highlight what it will be about.

Heading tags

Content is a crucial part to bettering your SEO, however, it is also important to structure your post. This can be done by labelling them using tags. The H1 tag should be reserved for the main title as it marks it as highest important. H2 descending to H6 are usually used for subheadings, with H2 having a higher status than and H6 being the lowest status.

Alt-text on Images

We add images to our blog posts to make them more engaging for the readers, unfortunately, crawlers may not be able to read your images. This is why you should apply alt-text to an image to notify the crawler what the content of the image is about, this will allow the image to show up on relevant image searches as well.

Executing SEO on your site

The more emphasis you apply to the SEO aspect of your blog, the better it will perform. While there is a lot of content online that you can get free guidance from, if you’re looking to step it up even more you can reach out to an SEO agency, who can provide an in-depth analysis of what you should be targeting.

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