When you have spent time, effort and money on building your blog, the last thing you want is for it to rank poorly on Google. Sadly, there are thousands of websites out there competing for that top spot on Google, which means that to stand out from the crowd, you really need to boost your SEO. SEO stands for search engine optimisation, the process of getting traffic from organic and natural search results on search engines. In this article, we will look at 7 simple ways you can improve your blog’s SEO. Follow these tips shared with us by a top blogging agency and watch as your rankings soar!
1. Ensure Your Blog Loads Quickly
One of the most important things when it comes to ranking high on search engine results is the speed at which your website loads. No one likes a website that takes eons to load - we live in a fast paced world where we need things to load instantly! In fact, it has been observed that users tend to leave a site even if they have to wait just a mere few seconds extra for a page to load. In order to combat this, ensure that your blog’s coding is clean and streamlined, and consider downloading a caching plugin. Try to minimise redirects and ensure that imagery is optimised to the best of your ability as well. All these little steps will result in a faster loading blog that search engines are sure to favour.
2. Publish Relevant, Relatable Content
Another crucial element when it comes to good SEO is ensuring that you are publishing content that is both relevant, relatable and up to date. Quality content is the number one driver of your search engine rankings, and there is absolutely no substitute for killer content. You can have an amazing looking blog, but if it doesn’t contain what people are looking for, they are going to be on their way and off to your competitor’s website instead. With that said, when writing, always remember to strike a good balance between writing for your audience and writing to rank on Google. Do not overload on keywords, and ensure that content is personable, flows naturally and informative to readers.
3. Image Optimisation
As mentioned above, image optimisation is an absolute necessity when it comes to a blog loading as quick as it possibly can. You can optimise images on a program such as Adobe Photoshop, or even download plugins on Wordpress such as Smush that will automatically optimise your imagery as you upload it into your media gallery. Aside from compressing the size of your image, keep note that you should label images with keywords, and add alternate descriptions to each image. This will ensure that search engines are picking up on the relevance of your imagery pertaining to a user search.
4. Utilise Outbound Links
Search engines love it when they can detect outbound links in your posts. To make your content more useful to readers, link out to authority sites that will provide your audience with more knowledge and information about what you are talking about. This increases the relevancy of your content, as well as the amount of time people will be spending on your blog. Furthermore, search engines tend to trust websites that have outbound links to high authority sites, so it’s a win-win situation for all.
5. Diverse Forms Of Multimedia
We have touched on imagery, but if you really want to up your SEO game, it is always advised that you include various forms of multimedia on your website to enrich user experiences. Video marketing is a fantastic place to start, and is a fantastic way of boosting both conversion and user engagement. Videos tend to be shared more than photos do as well, so you’ll be opening your content up to a much wider audience when users decide to share your videos on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Various forms of multimedia on your site sends a great signal of quality content to search engines.
6. Fix Those Broken Links
There is nothing more frustrating than clicking on a link only to be directed to a page that no longer exists. We’ve all been there! What’s worse is that, if search engines detect a high number of broken links throughout your blog, your rankings are going to suffer. Nothing sends a signal of a neglected website more than pages that do not work. Utilise a tool such as Google Webmasters to identify and fix any broken links that may exist on your blog.
7. Ensure Your Blog Is Mobile Responsive
Last but not least, ensuring that your website is utilising a mobile responsive theme is of absolute importance when it comes to excelling at the SEO game. A mobile responsive site is much favoured by search engines and increases your visibility on search results.
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Implementing these 7 easy strategies when it comes to improving your blog’s SEO will be something that you truly wish you had done sooner, so get on it and best of luck!