Blog SEO: Ultimate Guide 2023
What is Blog SEO?
As an SEO specialist, my job entails optimizing the design of a site’s architecture and content for search engines. As part of blog SEO, you will often have to perform on-page optimization, install plugins, speed up the loading of your site, as well as create internal links.
Why Is Blog SEO Important?
Blogs rely heavily on search engines for traffic.
Recently, the Search Engine Optimization industry ranked third most relevant source of traffic in a survey of over 1000 bloggers (right behind email marketing).
Search engine optimization is the most stable and consistent method of driving a blog’s traffic. You will be more likely to attract targeted traffic from Google by ranking for relevant keywords that people are searching for and maintaining those rankings over time.
It is common that traffic from other networks spikes at first but then declines rapidly.
The effectiveness of SEO is demonstrated by our own blog. Twitter, LinkedIn, email, and direct traffic bring us a lot of traffic. When you add them all up, they make up a lot of our monthly traffic.
The number of visitors we receive each month from Google is 396,000.
The growth of our site would have been significantly slower without blog SEO.
Check out these tested SEO tips if you are interested in learning how to optimize your website for search engine rankings.
Practices to Follow
Each post should contain one primary keyword
Your blog posts should each be optimized for a specific keyword.
Using a lot of different keywords in your post may confuse Google and other search engines. These engines may not be able to figure out what the content of your post is.
The topic of your article will easily be recognized by Google if you focus on a single keyword.
First of all, you need to select one primary keyword for your post.
I suggest you go after long-tail keywords at first if your blog is new. Keywords that have long tails are less competitive than keywords with shorter tails.
For long-tail keywords, try searching Google with a term.
Make sure to look under the search bar at the suggestions that Google provides.
Another option is to make use of Answer The Public, which is a nice free tool.
By using this tool, you can generate a list of keywords related to questions that you can target in your posts.
(This tool is not only beneficial for searching for keywords, but it can also provide you with suggestions for content topics.)
Your Blog Post Should Be Optimized
As soon as you determine your long-tail keyword, your post must be optimized to include it.
It is not necessary to repeat your keyword on every page of your site. Keyword stuffing is considered to be an unethical practice. In the past, the practice was effective. However, it can now be detrimental to search engine optimization efforts.
As a consequence, your keyword should be incorporated several times throughout your website.
Using title Tags and Titles
The title field is typically found at the top of the post in most content management systems (CMSs) like WordPress.
Additionally, your keyword should be included in the title of your blog post and the title of your web page.
Here’s an example of how our post title includes a search term from our site: “SEO keywords”:
Our title tag uses the exact same keyword as our meta description:
When it comes to blog SEO, your title tag is the most important of the two.
That’s because Google puts extra weight on terms that show up in your page’s title tag.
The title tag of your post is automatically generated by certain WordPress themes and plugins. However, other themes and plugins do not. By double-checking the HTML on your page, you should make sure your primary keyword appears in the title.
Introduction and Concluding Sections
Furthermore, your keyword should also be mentioned in the introduction and conclusion of your blog post.
Using these two key areas may assist with some on-page optimization, based on my personal experience.
Copywriting: The Definitive Guide, for example, is one of the guides I published.
The first keyword in my introduction is “copywriting” as you can see…
Finally, a little bit of closure.
The H1 and H2 Headings and the H3 Heading
Subheadings with H1, H2, or H3 should include your keyword.
Your post title becomes an H1 automatically when you use most WordPress themes.
You may wish to review your page’s HTML in order to confirm this, as well as the title tag.
Aside from an H1, your post should also contain at least one subheading containing a keyword.
The following keyword has been added to the H2 subheading:
When optimizing your blog content, it is important to keep these SEO best practices in mind.
However, they do not get to the bottom of the matter. Additionally, you may optimize the alt text, site speed, mobile responsiveness, and responsive design of your web pages as part of on-page SEO.
How to set up SEO plugins
Wix. Squarespace. Shopify. WordPress.
They all claim to be “SEO friendly” out of the box.
But no matter how SEO-friendly each one is, they usually need a little bit of help in order to maximize their search engine visibility.
Yoast SEO is by far the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress. But there’s also All In One SEO and RankMath.
Similar SEO plug-ins are available for almost all major blogging platforms.
In general, the specific plugin does not matter too much. An important aspect of using SEO plugins on your blog is choosing the right ones.
The plugins you are looking for should:
- Optimizing title and description tags for search engines can help you write better title and description tags.
- Create a sitemap: Sitemaps help search engines locate all the posts and pages that make up your blog
- Build an SEO-friendly website structure. If you run a blog, no indexing pages and posts you do not wish to be indexed by search engines is a very useful tool.
- Compress images for speed: The speed of your website will not affect your rankings. However, pages that load quickly will offer a slight advantage to your rankings.
When you have installed the plugins, you will need to.
Create a subfolder for your Blog
You do not need to worry about this if your blog already contains your website.
How does this apply to SaaS businesses? What services do you offer?
Where do you maintain your blog?
When blogs were first becoming popular, they were mainly placed on subdomains, as follows:
Blog.example.com
Subdomains are not very SEO friendly, as it turns out.
Rather than placing your blog in the root folder, you should create a subfolder.
example.com/blog
This is exactly what Backlinko does.
The blog was a subdomain but John Doherty moved it to a subfolder. By doing so, they experienced an increase in organic traffic of 98%.
Ensure your URLs remain active
The URL of a blog post can be very long.
In addition, long URLs don’t perform well in search engine optimization.
Short URLs correlate with higher Google rankings, according to our research.
I recommend short, custom URLs for all posts as a result.
Many blogging platforms (including WordPress) generate URLs based on the title of your blog.
If you wish to shorten your URL, you should be able to do so easily.
Moreover, if your URL includes a keyword, then you should be good to go.
Long URLs present other problems as well:
It is possible for your URLs to contain dates in your posts depending on how your blog is configured.
As a result, your URL is filled with extra junk, which can negatively affect your search engine ranking. This can also lead to your older posts appearing outdated.
The URL does not change even if the old content is updated in the future.
Custom, evergreen URLs for each post are ideal for avoiding these problems.
Each Meta Description Should be Unique
Google search results from over five million searches were analyzed.
The meta descriptions of organic search results can influence organic click-through rates. This was one of the most fascinating findings of our study.
As a result, it is extremely important that each post you publish on your blog is given a unique meta description.
A Google search engine will create its own meta description based on your page’s content if it does not have one.
People may be encouraged to click on their description if their description is engaging. However, you will usually find that a handwritten description works much better.
Please take note that your keyword does not need to appear in the meta description. The Google algorithm does not take into account the meta description. Its sole purpose is to increase organic click-through rates on search engine results pages.
Posts with internal links
Would you like an SEO procedure that is white hat, easy, and actually effective?
Interlink your website’s posts by using internal links.
In order to maximize the effectiveness of internal linking, follow these two steps when publishing new content:
In your new post, include five to ten internal links. These should come from older articles on your site.
Also, link to your new article from five to ten older ones.
While you are at it, ensure that your anchor text describes the content of your post. In other words, instead of anchor text such as: “this post”, use alternative anchor text such as “this article about user experience”.
That’s all there is to it.
Noindex Category and Tag Pages
There is almost no difference between category and tag pages. This can have negative effects on search engine optimization.
In this regard, I recommend placing the “no index” tag on category and tag pages for most websites. This will prevent the search engines from indexing some of the somewhat useless pages.
If these pages deliver traffic to your website, then you may be exempt from this rule. You may retain them if this is the case.
However, if you are like most bloggers, the noindex tag should be applied to your category and tag pages.
Create a Sitemap For Your Blog
Blogs have the advantage that Googlebot usually crawls them regularly since they are constantly publishing new content.
However, if you want to make it super simple for Google to crawl and index your posts, I recommend creating a sitemap. You can create a sitemap by putting links to each of your posts and pages on the page.
A sitemap can be automatically generated by many SEO plugins. The Yoast plugin, for instance, allows users to link to posts and pages.
Another reason for using a blog sitemap is to facilitate the creation of more pages on your website. Pages are sometimes buried beneath your blog posts, unlike blog posts, which appear on your blog feed.
As a result, search engines may have difficulty finding them. By linking to those pages internally, search engines may be able to locate them. However, it is also a good idea to have a sitemap of your website.
Utilize Search Console to Monitor Your SEO Efforts
Every blogger should have access to Google Search Console.
The GSC is packed with a wide range of features.
However, you should only pay attention to a few features if you are interested in blog SEO.
First, we have the Annual Performance Report.
Using this report, you will be able to see which keywords you are currently ranking for (as well as the number of people who click on your ranking).
The “Coverage” and “Sitemap” sections are also worth a look.
The Coverage feature helps you to determine the number of pages in Google that are currently indexed.
Sitemaps, meanwhile, display the most recent sitemaps retrieved by Google. Sitemaps can also be submitted for inclusion.
Create Featured Snippets for Your Posts
Featured Snippets are probably familiar to you.
They are short excerpts from the search results that Google pulls from its index. Organic results usually contain these short excerpts.
For Featured Snippets, Google usually pulls text from blog and article posts. Furthermore, blogs primarily publish content, so optimizing Featured Snippets should be a significant component of any blog’s search engine optimization efforts.
If you wish to make use of Featured Snippets, you must first identify which types you want.
Including a definition for Google to use in your post is the best way to rank for “Definition Snippets”.
As an example, here are the following:
Featured Snippets are also known as “List Snippets”.
Using a variety of subheadings in your post is the best way to optimize for these factors.
In this Featured Snippet, for example, our content appears.
Those items that Google displays on this list are all listed under a subheading within that post.
Your bounce rate should be reduced
Bounce Rate may or may not be factored into Google’s ranking algorithm.
To conclude:
There has been some research conducted to establish a correlation between bounce rate and rankings in the industry.
Do correlations imply causality? Certainly not.
However, there is no reason that you should not reduce your bounce rate. As a result, your search engine optimization can be improved.
So you’d better work on reducing your bounce rate.
It is generally recommended that you publish content that responds to Google’s searchers’ questions to reduce bounce rates on your website.
The content must satisfy searchers’ intent (otherwise it will not appear in search results).
If you are lucky enough to receive a comment such as this: “Nice”. Upon reading “This is precisely what I need”, they will remain on your site and read more.
However, if your post does not meet their needs, they will disappear.
Google will notice if enough people bounce and will reduce your ranking as a result.
Otherwise, I recommend that you concentrate on the design of your blog.
A reader makes a split-second decision about whether to stay on your site or not. They appear more professional if your blog appears to be professional.
As I have noticed when studying our Google Analytics data, we have professional guides with a lower bounce rate than other kinds of posts.
Link-building Information Should be Published
Currently, your blog is well-positioned for success in search engine optimization.
Having said that:
You can create content that is impressive and world-class for your blog. As well as applying every technique available for search engine optimization.
However, to have your blog ranked in Google, it is necessary to build backlinks. The more the better.
Fortunately, as you maintain a blog, your website is ideally suited for link building. The content you produce is always of high quality. It is precisely the sort of material that other bloggers desire.
Moreover, if your primary objective in the content marketing process is to increase the number of links to your blog, then you should focus on the following concepts:
Based on an analysis of 900+ million posts, these types of content received a greater number of links than the average.
Having said that, this is not to imply that you should only share why posts and infographics. The point is to say that these formats tend to provide the best results when it comes to linking.