Five Quick SEO Tips For Your Blog

"SEO on a railway platform" by superboreen

Search engines can bring a lot of readers to your blog. Getting people to find you will not happen overnight though. Here are five tips to help you on your way.

1. Choose a decent domain name

It’s a lot easier to get a good rank on Google if your domain name has keywords in it. Tying the domain to the name of the blog helps a lot – the two go hand in hand.

So if you’re writing about nightclubs, you could choose a particular type of club, either by music, clientele, dress code, or DJ. proghouseclubs.com would be better than trying to get nightclubs.com, for instance.

Think of how people should be finding your site – as in via which keywords? Do keep the domain short though – biglongkeywordedspammydomainforeveryonetofindongoogle is probably not the best idea…

2. Optimise your links

In WordPress, you can go to Settings – Permalinks and choose a better type of link. Don’t use the ones that end with ?p=1 as they do not perform as well on search engines. And on a related note…

3. Use strong titles

Don’t be vague or cryptic with your titles. Keep your titles short and meaningful, and include a keyword or two. Using the previous example of a nightclub blog, “Fabric” wouldn’t be a great post title – so how about “Fabric: Fun in Farringdon, London”? This adds keywords (Farringdon and London) and is also a reasonably catchy title without being too long.

4. Don’t go overboard

Putting loads of keywords in your domain name, post titles, post content and all around your site will look bad and may have a detrimental effect on your rank. I’ve seen so much “optimisation” that basically ends up creating duplicate content or looking spammy. Keep it subtle.

5. Be patient

Don’t panic if you aren’t highly ranked on Google after a few weeks of blogging. Speaking from experience, it takes time to target certain keywords and start appearing high in the rankings. If you stop blogging very early on, you’ll never see just how much traffic can come from search engines. One of my blogs gets more traffic from Google than from any other source. It takes time.

Also, don’t try to use every SEO technique at once – do the basics, then tweak from time to time and watch the results. If you change everything at once, you won’t know which techniques have worked and which haven’t.

Discussion

How many of these tips do you follow? What’s your experience with search engine traffic?