Essential SEO for Bloggers
For small businesses and individuals, free blogging software like WordPress is excellent because it’s partly optimised for search engines straight out of the box. In other words, nine times out of ten it will be easier to rank well if you use WordPress instead of building your own blog from scratch. Best yet, you can run your entire marketing website through WordPress so you only need to learn one software platform.
Using WordPress as the backbone for your website and blog is a great start however there are still some tweaks and adjustments you can make to take your rankings to the next level.
Choose a title that’s search-engine friendly
The title of a post appears at the top of the browser window and is used by search engines when they provide search results. It can be the same as the headline of the post itself or it can be different since its purpose is slightly different. WordPress is usually set to automatically make the title the same as the headline. This is convenient, but not always to your advantage for three reasons:
- The length of your headline may not be appropriate for the search engine results.
- The headline may be great for the post itself but may not attract as many clicks from search results.
- You may want to use keywords in the title that were not in the headline.
Popular SEO plug-ins will let you edit the title, so you can make it more suitable for search engine optimisation purposes.
Make sure the URL is relevant for the post
WordPress lets you edit the URL, so if you don’t like the auto-generated one, you can change it to anything you like. Normally its best that the URL is the same as the headline however if the headline is too long you can shorten it. This is great if you want to make your URL more memorable to promote in print based marketing for example. Use keywords where it makes sense to do so but only if it’s relevant to the post.
Write a good meta-description
The meta-description option isn’t currently available for WordPress straight out of the box. You will need a plug-in to make that happen and its well worth the effort. It is important, because it’s the piece of text that often shows up in the search results under the link. Firstly, you need to write something enticing here so people will click the link. Secondly, you should consider the keywords you want to rank well for and use them. Always write for humans first, search engines second. Keeping this general rule of thumb will ensure you don’t run into problems with search engines down the track. If you are messing with search engines, they will find out and slap you.
Use Alt image tags
Finally, you also want to add the Alt image tag to your images, using appropriate keywords, as this enables search engines to understand the image better, and rank it when relevant searches are carried out. And one other thing you can do is ask a web design services provider (Hint: Call Us) to look at your theme and tell you if it’s SEO friendly. If it’s not, make the necessary modifications, or get a new design. It will be well worth the small investment.
