Blogging 101: SEO for Beginners

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, which simply put is optimising your website and pages to get them to appear in the top results on a search engine. There’s multiple search engines such as Bing and Yahoo, but Google is the biggest and most used and most SEO is done to meet Google’s specified factors of how they rank websites.

Why is SEO important for your blog?

You may be asking ‘why is it even important for you to appear in search results?’. Most of your current views may be coming from social media, or direct referrals but search engines are an additional and often longer-term traffic source. Once your content is optimised for search engines, it can market itself without you needing to do anything with it, which means less time promoting your posts on social for the same views. Plus, it’s free to optimise except in time as long as you know the right keywords.

The Basics

If you’re using WordPress.Org the first thing you should do is download the Yoast plugin! It lets you know where you’re going wrong and right as you write each post and it’s an easy to use tool.

If you don’t, here’s some simple tips to follow to start optimising your posts:

Keywords

The main part of SEO is choosing the right keywords and phrases that you want your content to rank for. For example, this post’s chosen keyphrase is ‘SEO for beginners’. This will be placed strategically within the post.

Title

A good title is needed for SEO. The keyword or phrase should be present, and it should remain eye-catching and encourage readers to click through. From the title into the content, utilising keywords should be in a way that fits the sentences being used and makes sense.

Linking

Both internal and external links are important for SEO. You need to include links which link internally to your own website, as well as externally to others. Links into your website from others are also an important factor. However, spam links and links from those with less authority will be flagged by Google and may reduce your rankings. So be selective as to who you work with and get links from.

Images

Before uploading images to your site, make sure the name of the image has the keyword in it’s name. Then use the ALT text and description fields to describe the images you’re using, by using the keywords and phrases. This metadata helps inform the search engines find out what the page is about, and so keywords are vital in these areas.

Tags and Categories

Another important signal for search engines is what categories and tags are being used. They should be chosen carefully to describe what the post is about, and use multiple keywords which may be used to search for that particular piece of content.

HTML

HTML is how your webpage is set out in code and what the search engine reads. Therefore, utilising the correct HTML which tells the search engine what is going on is important. Heading tags signal which parts of the text are more important and segment the page into key sections, topics and/or phrases. Your main title will be <h1>, and your subheadings should start at <h2> and go in order as your headings are further segmented.