5 Quick Ways To Improve Your Blog Visibility Long-Term
This article was originally shared in Issue 21 of Blogging Breakthrough Magazine (June 2018).
We all know that search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the best ways for your blog or website to be discovered by your target audience, but who really has the time to keep up with Google algorithm updates and put these changes into practice on a monthly, weekly or even daily basis?
The good news is there are plenty of small tweaks that you can make to every blog post as you write and upload them that only take a few minutes of work but can really help to boost your chances of appearing higher up in search results and make the overall experience on your site better for your readers.
Break Up Your Post With Headings
This may seem like an obvious point but I still frequently come across posts, even from the most experienced bloggers out there, that are giant walls of text. Nothing puts off a reader more than endless scrolling through a stream of consciousness!
Headers are a great way to organise your content. They help you to stay on topic by concentrating your energy in short chunks of text and make it much easier for your readers to scan if they’re looking for something in particular.
Not only are headers great for user experience, they also give you an opportunity to throw in some keywords that you’d like your blog post to be known for. Think about how you use Google. I know that when I’m looking at a new product, one of the first things I search for is “(product name) review” and take a look at the first page of results. If you want readers to find your post for something this specific, make sure you’re adding some of those key phrases throughout your post.
Tag Your Posts and Add Them To A Category
If you’ve been blogging for a while, you likely have categories already built out. But if you don’t, start now! Depending on how your content management system (aka CMS - think Wordpress, Squarespace, Blogspot etc.) is set up, you may have category and tag pages that automatically populate with your post once that tag has been assigned.
Taking a few seconds to add these tags and categories to a new post can really help you long term as search engines read those overview pages and start to get an idea of what topics you write about and what search queries your posts could potentially answer.
Try to be as specific as you can with your categories and tags. For instance, you may talk about veganism, which would be a good category, then within that you could have tags for recipes, clothing, simple living etc. The more defined that you can make your content, the easier it is for search engines to understand what you’re posting about and the more likely you are to start appearing for some of those terms in search results.
Showcase Your Other Posts
You’ve already got a bunch of great content on your blog, so show it off! Spending a few minutes going through your new post and linking to other posts you already have is a great way to encourage readers to move around your site and, as a result, improve important metrics such as time spent on your site and lower your bounce rate. Don’t worry too much about the jargon, just know that these are really helpful in letting Google know that your site is high quality and should be considered for more search results.
Linking to other posts that already exist is also a good way to highlight some of your older content that might now be buried by a large number of new posts. If your content is evergreen (timeless and not tied to a one-off event, promotion or news story), a link from a more recent post can help bring something older back to life and top of your reader’s mind. You never know what someone might be interested in and want to share, even if it was posted a year ago or longer.
Rename Your Images Before Uploading
Is it just me or don’t you hate seeing hundreds of unnamed photos sitting in a folder on your computer? DCS3485749 just doesn’t do it for me! To save yourself hours of going through hundreds of images when you’re writing and formatting a new post, take 5-10 minutes and rename all of the pictures you plan to use when you upload them from your camera card.
Try to stick to descriptive names such as “blue-flower-on-desk”. Not only will this help you to find the right image when it comes time to add them to your post, those file names will also stick upon upload to your CMS and will publish with those names. If they’re descriptive, that can also help search engines when they’re reading the backend code of your post and they can pull those images with the descriptions into image searches such as Google Images. Image optimization is often overlooked so taking this extra step could give you a great advantage over bloggers who produce similar content to you!
Don’t Forget Your Title and Meta Descriptions
You’ve seen them, the big blue title and the 2-3 sentences below when you search for something on Google. Those are the title and meta descriptions and are some of the quickest, but most easily forgotten, parts of a web page or blog post that you can update.
As with your headings, you’ll want to make sure that both the title and meta descriptions contain a keyword or two for what you’d like your post to appear for in search results. Don’t spend too long on this though; your title should be around 55-60 characters and your description should be around 120-130 characters.
While it’s debatable how much direct impact these have on SEO (titles often do, descriptions less so), both are still incredibly important in attracting readers to click on your post over someone else’s and that traffic is always a great sign of a high quality and worthy site in the eyes of a search engine.
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Don’t be scared of technical terms like SEO, meta description or UX. Ultimately, you want your content to be found by the people who are most interested in it and these quick tricks will help you on your way to achieving that. Spending a few extra minutes before hitting “publish” on every blog post can really help you to see long-term success with your blog, which is what it’s all about!
