As a blogger, you’ll probably have heard quite a lot about SEO and how you can use it to expand the reach of your blog, however, there are still many bloggers who aren’t sure where they should start with their SEO, or why they should start it in the first place. Luckily, the basics of SEO are pretty simple to get your head around, and the results really do speak for themselves. As a blogger, you always want to see more traffic, more engagement and more reach, so SEO is a pretty obvious choice!

 

KEYWORD RESEARCH & WRITING WITH KEYWORDS

Keyword research is, essentially, the practice of finding the words and phrases that Google and other search engines associate with the topic you’re writing about, so you can incorporate them into what you write and hopefully move your posts and blog as a whole up the search engine rankings when people search for the things your blog focuses on. It’s not difficult to do either – Google has its own keyword research tools and there are plenty of third party options that can help you find and utilise relevant keywords, like SEMRush and Ahrefs.

To write with keywords in mind, identify a broad spectrum of keywords that you want to target, and try to incorporate them into the content you write. Some bloggers like to do this as they go along, while others prefer to find places they can incorporate keywords after the main body of the post is written – it’s completely down to personal preference.

If you can get your keywords in important places in your content, that will only help your blog SEO even more. Keywords in the title of your post, headings and subheadings, your first and last sentences and within hyperlinks in your content (also known as anchor text) will all have a much bigger impact on your SEO than simply including the keywords in the body of your post. However, don’t go overboard – “keyword stuffing” is something that search engines will actually recognise as a bad thing, so keyword in moderation!

 

OPTIMISE YOUR IMAGES

As well as optimising the text in your blog posts, you can also optimise the images! When you upload a photo to your blog, make sure you include keywords in the file name, and use accurate and descriptive alt text, so even though search engines can’t see the photos you’re using, they’ll still be able to work out what they are about.

With just a bit of thought, research and care, it really is very easy to get started with the basics of SEO on your blog, and the results are certainly worth it.

 

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR READING!

xo N

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This is a contributed post.