3 Easy Tips for Improving Blog SEO

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The higher your blog appears in search engine rankings, the easier it will be for readers to find you when they’re searching for your topics. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a proven method for making blogs and websites more findable and increasing traffic to your site in the increasingly crowded blogosphere.

Improving your rankings with search engines is a long-term process, and many SEO strategies are complex and take time to implement. However, there are a few things you can do to immediately improve SEO on your blog.

These three quick tips will help you rise through the ranks.

Headlines: Sacrifice Some Flash in Favor of Search Terms

Sept13This post could have been titled “Fast & Dirty Tips for Boosting Your Blog to the Top.” And while that headline might be cool and could make good click bait, the words themselves are missing something: popular search terms.

Headlines, subheadings, and page titles are weighted heavier than regular text by search engines. With the above headline, people searching for “easy blog tips” or “improving blog seo” will be more likely to come across this post, than they would if the flashy headline had been used.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t have click bait-worthy headlines for some of your posts. It’s good to mix things up, with some attention-grabbing post titles and others that make use of your target keywords in natural ways.

Link to Your Own Content

Everyone knows that links strengthen search engine rankings. However, it’s important to link to quality content and avoid link farms, questionable sites, and irrelevant connections. So when you need to expand on something you’ve mentioned in a post, why not direct readers to more of your content?

Tying your blog posts together not only gives your pages more search engine juice, it also helps your readers find more information on what interests them quickly, without leaving your site or having to search through your archives.

You can also add a “related posts” section at the end of each post to encourage further reading. If you have a WordPress blog, it’s easy to do with some good related post plugins.

Enlist Your Readers to Improve Your SEO

This doesn’t mean you should start asking your blog visitors to work on your site. Instead, it’s a simple yet often overlooked way to spread inbound links—which are more weighted by search engines than outbound links—through social sharing buttons.

You don’t even have to put in any additional marketing efforts for this one (though you can, if you’re so inclined). Just add a few popular social sharing buttons at the end of each of your posts. Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ are good to include, and you might add a few more if your readers spend a lot of time on Pinterest or LinkedIn.

Some of your readers will choose to share your content, which will get you linked from their social media pages. You can usually get more shares simply by asking people to click on a share button if they enjoyed the post.

Take a few minutes to improve your blog’s SEO with these easy-to-implement tips.

And here’s a bonus checklist of the most important ranking factors, courtesy of SearchEngineLand.com.

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Image courtesy of Annie Mole

Megan Totka

Megan Totka is a freelance writer, business expert and consultant. She was the marketing & editorial director at ChamberofCommerce.com for over a decade. As a business expert, she specializes in reporting the latest business news, helpful tips and reliable resources, as well as providing business advice. She has significant experience with the topic of business marketing, and has spent several years exploring topics like copywriting, content marketing, list building, social media and any hot topics to help businesses run their business successfully.

27 thoughts on “3 Easy Tips for Improving Blog SEO”

  • Hi Megan Totka

    I think doing nothing with SEO is the best to get great results, if you focus on quality content and little on page SEO then you can easily get rankings and success with blog, because sometimes we put efforts and get bad results.
    Be neutral and Google will gift you rankings!

    • Hi Nishant,

      I agree that quality content is crucial to SEO success. When combined with strategic linking, guest posting, meta tags, and other elements, this is a recipe for high rankings and visibility.

      Best,
      Megan

  • Great points Megan. Yes headlines are pretty important. And I’ve found from my experience that putting the important keywords in the heading has a great impact in search – especially given that search is appreciating more and more relevancy.

    And yup we cannot deny the fact that social is getting hand in hand with search engine visibility. If a post goes viral in social media, it gets a natural boost in search rankings!

    • Hi Jane,

      Thanks so much for your input. Yes, relevancy is key, as is social media optimization.

      Best of luck to you!
      Megan

  • SEO has worked wonders in increasing page rankings of websites. Blogging is also an important seo tool. It is very true that headlines, subheadings, and page titles are weighted heavier than regular text by search engines, so they must be chosen carefully.

    • Great points! Thanks for your feedback.

  • Nice informative and descriptive post. I totally agree that keywords and backlinks plays very important role in SEO. In fact, total SEO process based on these two things. Thanks for such interesting post.

    • Hi Prakash,

      Thanks for your input. Glad you found the post useful! Best of luck to you.

      Megan

  • great review…
    You can one more thing to improve SEO that is “Quality Content”..
    As we know that,people will always been attract towards quality content not towards its quantity…
    keep rocking…:)

    • Yes, absolutely, quality content is critical! Thanks for reading and commenting.

      Megan

  • Awesome tips Megan, these tips will surely guide all the blogger for improving the blog.

  • Is keyword research also important in this field.? I am new int he field of sEO and right now am spending much time in the Keyword research. But the above information I found is truly informative.

    • Hi, Kate – I think keyword research definitely still holds some importance. The most effective SEO approach blends multiple strategies. Thanks for reading!

  • Great tips, Megan! I sacrifice (maybe too often) keyword rich titles for click bait titles. Linking to past articles is great advice and think it’s sometimes often overlooked. It’s effective, easy to do and keeps your reader on your site.

    • Adam – I completely agree! Trying to include relevant links to old articles in every post is a great way for readers to not only gain valuable information but keep readers on your site for longer.

  • Hi Megan,

    Thanks for sharing this wonderful tips on how to improve SEO. Understanding SEO gives you a head ups when it comes to building a successful website.

    • Yes, every small business owner should understand the basics so they can make the most of their blog!

  • maybe i should fokus on on page seo first before off page seo to improve my blog

  • An effective, catchy headline attracts readers to your post, so always choose your title wisely. Also, interlinking your blog post will helps you to engage your readers within your site, this will reduce bounce rate of your website.

    • I completely agree that effective, catchy headlines are the best way to attract readers to your post. Thanks for reading!

  • nice article very easy and helpful tips. internal linking and related post are nice way to increase website page view. thanks for sharing.

  • Wow. It’s really nice. It will help a lot to improve your blog seo. Thanks for sharing such useful information.

    • I’m glad you found the information helpful!

  • Hi Megan,
    I agree that Catchy headline is the face of your article. If headline is not catchy it will not attract traffic. Some attractive and easy to understand keywords should be used to attract the readers.

  • One thing I have to say, this post is very meta. I love how you use the post to describe what you’re doing with it for search engine optimization.

    What I think a lot of people don’t understand is that a website with good SEO is also a useful website. It reminds me of an old episode of the Simpsons when Bart figured out the best way to cheat on a test and not get caught: memorizing everything that could possibly be on the test in advance.

  • You put the correct information regarding search engine optimization tips and tricks to achieve high ranking through quality content and quality backlinks because off-page and on-page both are crucial for better optimizing any website.Great shares for assisting others to improve their website ranking.

  • Hi,

    Actually I think the way we set title tags in order to attract people is the best SEO practice to generate lots of hits through search engine. Only organic traffic matters to rank a blog higher.

    Regards
    Mrityunjay

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