Search Engine Optimisation is probably the most important thing to learn before starting your blog. A new blog without proper SEO is like an aeroplane without flying gear. It can never take off. Like a plane forever standing on ground, more like a car with useless wings.To help you take off with your new blog, here are some of my tips:
1. Pick the right keywords
Google searches a blog or any page on Web by the familiar keywords present in its content. Some keyword are common “basketball game”; some are local “restaurants in Melbourne” some long tail “best thai food in Sydney”; some are commercial “buy iPhone 6 in Melbourne”. Choose your keywords wisely: some are harder to rank; some have low volume. Don’t stuff them everywhere, making poor structures sentences.
If you don’t know how to find the appropriate keywords for your blog, then a comprehensive keyword research is recommended. There are many tools for easing keyword research. An online search is probably gonna throw thousands of those, choose wisely. If you absolutely have no idea how to proceed, I recommend outsourcing the keyword research part to a specialising agency.
2. Optimise the page title with one of the keywords
Unless you define page titles on every blog you have published, the blog engine is going to use the default title, which won’t be very SEO friendly. Page titles, which are displayed over the browser windows or over the tabs, are important SEO parameters and should contain at least one relevant keyword to the post’s content or Google won’t be able find your post.
Warning: Don’t make your titles too long. Search engines in their results will truncate anything more than 79 character.
3. Optimise the page URL
Just like the title, keywords can also be embedded in the URL. You can use either the one used in the title or its variant. But don’t use the default URL as they disastrous from SEO point of view.
4. Share the blog
The old school, optimising few of the on-page SEO elements, is not enough anymore. The search engines are evolving. Sharing is now a considerable search signal and is as important as any other SEO parameter. Sharing is not enough itself. The key is to generate engagement through social channels: Twitter, Facebook, G+, and LinkedIn. The number of likes in Facebook, retweets in Twitter is as important as optimising your website title for SEO. Sharing every other post is not going to work, at all.
5. Linking your blogs to external Websites
Finds blogs that are related to yours. Once found try putting links over there. Submitting a guest blog to that blog is a great idea to do so. So is commenting in one of their related blog post.
Don’t try to build 100s of links in a day. Remember the fable, “Slow and Steady Wins the Race”.
Conclusion:
You may dig around Google a bit and come up with hundreds of more tips and relevant arguments around them. I am not telling you to withdraw them as useless. Absorb as much of it; look at every aspect then draw a concrete SEO strategy around your blog.
