SEO for the Non-Techie Blogger
Every blogger wants their blog to rank the highest on search engines. They want their blog to show up 1st on every query carried out on a search engine based on any of the keywords they used in their posts. But this could be a tall order if you don’t know the ropes.
There are many technical articles on how to perform Search engine optimization for your blog and posts; rest assured that this is one of them. In this article I will try to simplify the process of optimizing your blog and posts for search engines; let’s gets started, there’s plenty to talk about.
What really is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to methods, techniques, and strategies a blogger must employ to make their blog easy to crawl and easier to index by search engines. If you don’t understand a word of that, well, don’t bother; just bear in mind that you perform SEO to rank higher on search engines result page (the page that comes up when you search google).
Of course, we all know the top search engines of this world – Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, etc.
The job of carrying out SEO is one that never ends, you have to keep optimizing for new keywords to achieve better ranking and Click-through-rates (CTR).
How do I perform SEO for my blog?
These easy to follow tips will help you walk through the entire process.
Make proper use of heading structure
To optimize your post for search engines, you must properly structure the headings of your posts. Usually, your post title has already taken up the H1 heading tag, hence other subheadings has to be formatted to the H2 heading tag and so on.
Proper use of headings is an easy to apply SEO technique and one that should not be overlooked. It is advised that you sprinkle a few keywords on each of your subheadings.
Use image alt attribute
The images you use in your posts also need to be optimized for search engines. You can do this by given the correct alt (alternate text) description of any image you intend on using on your post.
This is as simple as renaming the image before using it in your post. Let the name of the title of the image reflect what the image is all about, e.g. an image of a stone should be named “stone.jpg” instead of “gh667.jpg”.
This can also draw users who search for images with the right image title to your blog.
Carry out Keyword research
Carrying out keyword research simply means finding out the terms people search for when they go on search engines like Google. Finding out these terms help you build your content around the terms being searched for in your niche. The easiest way to carry out keyword research is using google keyword planner. Just sign up and get researching.
Write unique and helpful content
Your content is a huge determinant of how much backlinks you get from other top bloggers and of course your blog’s search engine ranking too.
If you’ve noticed, not just any website or blog makes it to the first page of Google and other search engines, only those with helpful content does. So if your post is helpful and unique enough, you’ll rank higher.
Use responsive themes that doesn’t slow down your blog
If your blog loads slowly, it could hurt your ranking on search engine. See this article on why your website loads slowly and try to apply the suggestions. Use responsive themes that are SEO friendly.
Your theme must be mobile friendly too, this counts for a lot as regards SEO.
Create a sitemap
Creating a Google sitemap will make it easier for Google and other search engines to crawl your blog more easily. A sitemap is you showing Google spiders the way around your blog. Of course, your ranking will improve after you do this.
Write a Meta description for each post
If you use WordPress, then you can employ this amazing method of optimizing your posts for search engines. But to do this, you need to first install an SEO plugin called Yoast. When you are done with the installation, you can now go ahead to write Meta description for each post before you publish.
A Meta description is a 156-character description of your post; make it as nice as sweet as possible, because this is what tempts people to click on your post title that shows up on search engine result pages.
Link back to your old posts
It’s called interlinking and it’s one way of helping search engines crawl your blog better. Linking back to your older posts is not really a difficult task, as soon as you write about something related to what you’ve written before, don’t hesitate to insert a link to the post.
Practice backlinking
Create backlinks when possible. Backlinks are simply incoming links from another page to your website. You can create backlinks through several ways such as social bookmarking, guest posting, content promotion, leaving relevant comments on high authority blogs with a link back to your site.
I hope you find this helpful. I’ll love to hear from you, what non-techie SEO techniques are you using? Let us know in the comments section!
