The world of SEO has always been a tricky ocean to navigate, the reason being is that it is ever changing. Don't let that put you off learning all about it though, it still plays a massive part in the success of your blog or website.
Let's start with what SEO actually is and how it works. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, which refers to where your blog/website ranks in the search engines. If you own a beauty blog and you type 'beauty blog' into Google, are you amongst the 1st page results? Those that are will probably have worked on their SEO to get there.
Search engines send out tiny 'spiders' to catalogue the gigantic amount of information on the internet, so that they can store it in a massive online warehouse and pull it out when someone is searching for it. These 'spiders' can only read though, they can't look at pretty pictures or watch cat videos on YouTube. This means that you have to make sure you are including relevant text in your posts, in your HTML and in your descriptions, because without it, the 'spiders' won't know how to catalogue your information in the giant internet warehouse.
There are a few ways you can quickly and easily improve your SEO no matter if you're a blogger using Blogger or Wordpress or if you have an awesome website for your business. Here are a few basic things you can think about to get you started in the world of search engine optimisation.
Name your images before uploading them. This is so important and easy to do. When you name your images on your computer, be sure to give them relevant names that correspond with your post or web page. You will often find images from blogs and websites on Google Images and they show up when you search because they've been named relevantly to what you're searching for.
Target your keywords. I wrote a post all about finding your keywords and how to use them, which will help you to make a list of your blog or businesses keywords and phrases. You should use these in all of your posts, page descriptions, social media descriptions and in your image titles. It's also great if you can squeeze one or two into your page/post title. This will make sure the 'spiders' know what your page or post is all about.
Use Title and ALT attributes in your HTML. You don't have to be a HTML wizard to do this, simply head to your HTML and find any links, tables or any structural elements and give it a title. It will usually look like this: <a class='Link' href='https://URLHERE.com' title='title of link'>
The title tag explains what the element is about, it's great for naming specific pages on websites and you'll see it a lot in the <head> section of your HTML.
The ALT attribute is used for images, it helps catalogue images for those poor 'spiders' that can only read text. it comes inside the <img> tag before the last > e.g. <img src="http://URLHERE.com" alt="image for post">. You can make sure your blog images have these by going into your blog HTML. If you use blogger, you can do it by creating a new post/edit post and adding your image, switch to the HTML view in the post and add it to the image HTML.
Build your backlinks. Search engines love a good strong backlink and they can be tricky to get your hands on if you're relatively new to the game. The best way to get a few links under your belt as a new blogger or business, is through guest posting. Contact a handful of blogs you really love and feel like you could write a small post for and see if they would like to feature it.
Another way is to make sure that you're posting amazing and helpful content that people actually want to link back to. This might sound extremely difficult at first but if you have patience it will be more rewarding than anything else you do.
You can of course pay for an ad space on other blogs, the only thing you will have to be wary of is if those links have a 'no-follow' attribute in the code. If the links on your ad space have 'no-follow' in them, then the link won't be counted as a back link. You can do a bit of code research to find this out by using Google Chrome web browser, going to view > Developer > View source and searching for your ad link.
Another way is to make sure that you're posting amazing and helpful content that people actually want to link back to. This might sound extremely difficult at first but if you have patience it will be more rewarding than anything else you do.
You can of course pay for an ad space on other blogs, the only thing you will have to be wary of is if those links have a 'no-follow' attribute in the code. If the links on your ad space have 'no-follow' in them, then the link won't be counted as a back link. You can do a bit of code research to find this out by using Google Chrome web browser, going to view > Developer > View source and searching for your ad link.
Are you new to SEO? Are you putting some time aside to really focus on optimising your website for search engines?
This is so helpful Cat! Thank you!!
ReplyDeleteI will personally try to make an effort to appease the little spiders and name my images accordingly. It's something that I also find useful when pinning my images on Pinterest but that I don't do well enough.
-xx-
Jessica
http://www.kaleidoscopesandpolkadots.co
I'm so glad you found it useful! I'm just as guilty of not naming images as the rest of the blogging world though haha
Delete