6 – Quick and Easy Things You Can Do To Help Your SEO

We all know that SEO is extremely important in making your blog a success. There are lots of free resources to help you improve your SEO which are useful but can take time to read and implement. 
It would be great if we all had hours to research and implement SEO tactics, but reality often means that SEO can seem quite a big daunting task and so easily fall down the to-do list. 

To help you get started we have put together a list of top Quick and Easy Things You Can Do To Help Your SEO

1. Choose a searchable title

When thinking about the article you are writing try to think about how you would search for that content in a search engine. Writing a list of things to do with kids during the Easter school holidays in Manchester? What would you search for? Probably something along the lines of ‘Easter activities manchester’ or ‘Easter kids activities Manchester’or even better ‘FREE Easter kids activities Manchester’. Making your title make sense to what someone will search automatically helps with SEO.

2. Use your title keywords wisely

Once you have chosen your keywords make sure you use them in your posts. Along with using them in your title, you should use them in a natural way in your first paragraph and a few times throughout the post. You should also make sure some of your images titles, your meta description and at least one or two of your subheadings (see below) also features the keywords. 

3. Break Up your paragraphs

Search engines prioritise user experience when ranking content and providing users exactly what they are looking for. It is therefore important to make it easy for both search engines and your visitors to read your content. To help with this you should use short paragraphs and which are then broken up with a combination of H2, H3 and when suitable H4 headings. (Don’t forget to include your keywords)

4. Link Your Posts 

Once your post is up make sure you add links to it from your other relevant posts. Not only will potentially keep your readers on your site but may also help with your SEO. 
When search engines are crawling your site they use the connections between pages to determine the context of your website and where to rank it. If they see a lot of pages linking to a certain post they will see it as important and more like to rank it high. Just always remember to link to other posts in a structured logical way, remember user experience is important. Using the Internal Link Juicer plugin I mentioned in my last article will make this really easy.

5. Check your posts

Once your posts have been up for a while it is worth checking on how they are doing. If you have a lot of content it may be hard to know where to start. That is where Google Analytics comes in. 
Head over to Google Analytics, click Acquisition on the reports menu, then Search Console and landing pages. This will tell you which of your posts have had the most impressions on Google Searches, how many people clicked through to the post and what position your article ranked on the search. Click on your article link and you can also find what search query lead users to your article, which attracted the most clicks and where you ranked on google for that query. If an article is getting lots of impressions but nobody is clicking through this shows your content is helping you rank high and your keywords are working. However, your title and description may be confusing. Try searching for one of the search queries that you rank for yourself. Look at what your Google result looks like and compare it to those that rank above you (which are likely to be getting more clicks) to see how you can improve it. 

6. Keep on top of your SEO

Once you have started implementing some of the above tactics make sure you keep on top of them. Make sure you think about keywords for all new posts and set an appointment in your calendar for checking them a few months down the road. You can also look at how you can improve some of your older posts that are not ranking as high as you would like. This may seem like a huge job but you can simply put aside 30 minutes a week and concentrate on one article at a time looking on Google Analytics as above to which you should prioritise. Once you start implementing SEO tactics it will soon become second nature and a lot less daunting to delve a little deeper.

If you would like to read more on improving SEO Productive Blogging has some great resources including a beginners guide here.