There are many simple and powerful ways you can improve the optimisation of the content on your blog to achieve better search engine rankings. In this post, we’ll detail some of the most important aspects that can help you achieve better search engine rankings.
Use proper article titles.
Do not use short article titles. Make them descriptive to what your article is about. While you shouldn’t add unnecessary keywords to your article, it can provide better SEO exposure by having a descriptive article title.
Make use of tags and categories.
You’d be surprised how useful the categories and tags function is in WordPress and other blogging software. Make use of them as they do help with your search engine optimisation.
Use relevant keywords for internal backlinks.
If you are backlinking to a specific area of your website in a blog post, make sure you use relevant keywords in the hyperlink text. And if you have external backlinks, if you don’t want to pass on SEO benefits to others and have search engine bots go to those external websites, make sure each hyperlink has a rel=”nofollow” attribute attached to the <a> tag of the hyperlink. You can install plugins that can do this for you automatically; but the plugins we’ve tried do not work for subdomains – for example, if your blog is on blog.example.com, the plugin will add a nofollow to any backlinks to the main site (i.e. example.com). So you can also install a WordPress plugin that does this for you so long as your blog is not hosted on asubdomain.
Add alternative text for any images you add in your posts.
When you upload an image or use an existing one, there is a section for Alt text. You may not think it’s useful to make use of this, but it is for a number of reasons:
- It is required for compliance to XHTML Strict standards;
- It assists those who are blind or partially sighted and make use of reader devices to read the alt tag of images to describe what the image is;
- Google and other search engines take it into account.
Why does Google take the alt tag into account? Well, it’s an alternative description of an image, and Google takes this into account. Therefore it’s a good SEO measure.
Do not use too many backlinks per post.
Google is smart and can tell when you’re using too many backlinks per post. If you’re trying to improve the SEO of your internal pages, limit backlinks to two per post – and make sure they’re in context. Don’t just add backlinks for the sake of it, because your readers will definitely notice this even if Google may not.