The Ultimate SEO Guide for Bloggers

SEO Guide for Bloggers - All bloggers want their blogs to be crawled, followed, indexed, searched, and displayed on the SERPs. As an ultimate guide to blog SEO, this article will help you to do the best practices to boost your blog SEO which are extremely important for bloggers.

There are at least three types of SEO: on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. We will discuss each of them separately but you need to see them as a whole. All of the SEO types are related and supporting to each other.

Difference between on-page, off-page SEO, and technical SEO

What is On-Page SEO?

Quoted from Digital Marketing Institute:

“On-page SEO involves all the on-site techniques you can employ to ensure a webpage will rank on a SERP, and it can also help determine how well that page ranks. It uses both content and technical elements to improve the quality of a page, so the more on-page SEO you do, the more traffic you’ll get to a website and the more relevant that traffic will be.”

Based on the description of on-page SEO above, we can think that on-page SEO is a page optimization that focuses on the elements and structures of a webpage. In more humanly language, on-page SEO is about how you build your webpage and how it looks like. However, how human eyes see your webpage differs from how search engines see it. Therefore, on-page SEO is more than how you style your webpage.

On-page SEO can also be understood as the technical optimization of a webpage in its internal body. On-page SEO of your blog does not directly related to the external environment but plays important role in the eyes of search engines (and visitors).

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What is Off-Page SEO?

Weidert writes:

“While on-page SEO refers to the factors you can control on your own website, off-page SEO refers to the page ranking factors that occur off your website, such as backlinks from another site. It also includes your promotion methods, taking into account the amount of exposure something gets on social media, for example.”

Off-page SEO refers to how your website interact and relate with the other websites. In other words, if people can find your website or blog from other websites, you have an off-page SEO. The off-page SEO relates on how good your blog is in the people eyes so that they put a link back your site; it is called backlink.

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is still related to on-page SEO. Technical SEO refers to the optimization of a webpage so that it is responsive or mobile friendly, loads fast, easy to navigate, and attractive. Technical SEO relates to the overall performance of your blog that influences visitors experience.

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On-Page SEO Best Practices

Content

Content is King. One of the best on-page SEO practices is publishing quality content in your blog. A quality content means fresh and unique content. People might have written the article you write today so you need to think what new value or information your articles have. Many bloggers used article spinners to create low-value content and it seems that search engines like Google should take this problem very seriously. Your content should contain information that people are searching for because if none searches your content, they will not find your blog although it is indexed by search engines. You can use Google trends to find ideas for your article.

Keywords

Your content is developed based on the keywords you have searched and decided to put on your blog. Keywords are the words people type on the Google search box. New blogs are suggested to use long-tail keywords (keywords that consist of 4+ words). Keywords research is quite important in term. How and where to place the keywords are also important. Keywords can be placed in the meta keywords tag, article label or category, and in the article body.

Title Tag

The title tag contains the title of your blog or article. One of the best on-page SEO practices is to optimize your title by putting the main keywords in it without disturbing the flow of the title. How you put the keywords in your title should be natural and readable.

Meta Description

How to use meta tags is important for your blog on-page SEO. One of the meta tags is meta description. If you are using blogger platform, your article has a custom description in the right sidebar of the editor. You should put a short description (not more than 150 characters) that contains main keywords. You can also add meta description of your blog in the blogger theme which will be applied to the homepage of your blog.

Alt Text

The images that you use in your article can be SEO optimized. You can use the alt text as the container of the keywords but do not do keyword stuffing because Google hates it. The alt text should contain the description of the image. It is in the description that your keywords are placed.

SSL/HTTPS

Page security is more important than ever, and enabling Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) security technology is crucial for improving your security, trustworthiness, and visibility. By enabling SSL, you increase the likelihood that a third party doesn’t come between your web server and the visitors’ web server, ensuring that information entered on the site is safe. Likewise, Google actually prefers sites that are SSL-enabled, making it essential to boosting visibility.

URL Structure

Make use of the permalink in your blogger. Instead of having long URL for your page, optimize by trimming the URL and let it contains the main keywords. Nevertheless, make sure that the way you structure the URL is relevant to the content that the URL refers to.

Internal Linking

Link your other and old articles to the new articles because it will strengthen the internal linking within your blog. It also allows the visitors to engage and read the other related articles you have in your blog. When you put a link of your article, make sure that the anchor text is relevant to the article, flow naturally, and contains keywords.

Breadcrumb Navigation

Free blogger templates are designed to have breadcrumbs navigation. Breadcrumb navigation contains clickable links although they are not intended to be clicked. Breadcrumb navigation is an important element of the blog according to Google search console because the breadcrumb determines how your article is displayed in the SERP.

Headings

All HTML tags are important for on-page SEO because they are signals to the search engines about how to render your blog or webpage. One of the most important HTML tags for SEO is heading (and subheadings). You need to use them properly. If you are using any custom blogger templates right now, you are recommended to not using <h1> in your article page because your blog title has used <h1> tag. The headings and subheading should use <h2>, <h3>, and <h4>. Do not skip any heading tag because it will disturb the search engine in rendering your webpage.

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Off-Page SEO Best Practices

Backlinks

Write good, fresh, and unique content because by doing so other bloggers or webmasters will link your article in their web. Backlinks that search engines value are backlinks that is created not by yourself but by other people. It shows the value of your content. Other ways to have backlinks are by joining discussion forum like Stackoverflow and Quora. You can answer the questions there and put a link to your webpage as the reference.

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Domain Authority

The number of backlinks that you have determines your domain authority. Not only that, the fewer the broken links in your page, the higher the domain authority. Domain authority can be seen like a grade given by search engines but it does not determine the page rank. Another aspect that influences the domain authority is the age of your blog; it means that the older your blog, the higher the authority. However, make sure that your domain history is good. Make sure that you don’t do any violation for it will influence your domain authority in the future.

Social Promotion

Promote your blog or article in the social media like Facebook, twitter, or Pinterest. However, don’t publish your link more than once in a day because Facebook will catch it as SPAM! Once a day is good. By promoting your blog article in the social media, you allow people to find it just by clicking the link. Please do not make a clickbait.

Ads

If you have some money, you can apply to Google AdWords or Facebook ads. They will promote your blog to the public and you will have more visitors.

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Technical SEO Best Practices

Consistent Publication

Search engines love new and fresh contents. Publish your article consistently but make sure that you don’t use article spinners. Please do not do plagiarism because once search engines find it, they will ban your blog.

Broken Links Check and Fix

Check and fix any broken links because broken links hurt SEO. You can use any brokenlink checkers available for free in the internet. Once you find any broken links in your blog, fix them either by changing the link content or remove them.

Correct Settings in Robots.txt

Robots.txt is a file that contains rules applied to search engines (the bots or spiders or crawlers). You need to set the robots.txt in your blogger by activating the custom robots.txt in the blogger setting. If you are not sure of what to do with the robots.txt, you may need to consult with experts about how to use custom robots.txt for SEO. You can also use the best SEO friendly robots.txt generator to have your robots.txt for free and easily.

Fast and Responsive Blogger Template

Last but not least, you should use fast and responsive blogger template. You can use Google PageSpeed Insight to measure how fast your blog loads. If you find that your blog takes too much loading time, you can decrease the page loading time by eliminating the render-blocking resource or removing unwanted scripts from your blog. If you find it too technical, you can choose the best responsive blogger template for free. You can also compress the size of your HTML code by using our HTML Minifier.