This is a Guest Post by Joseph Adediji.
Search engine optimization may seem like rocket science to some bloggers, but it is not that difficult. everyone at one stage or the other have had doubt of being able to understand and implement Search engine optimization techniques, but I believe that you can become proficient in Search engine optimization if you are willing to learn.
Am not a SEO GURU, but at least I have learnt some things and I have a couple of years experience when it comes to Search Engine Optimization.
For those who want to know how to optimize their blog for better rankings, this is a post for you, I have tried to simplify On-Page SEO as much as possible so that it will be easy for you to understand and implement.
Here we go:
1. Page Titles
The foremost important part of On-page optimization is your title; a page title tells the search engines and people what that particular page is all about. Your page title is very important if you want to achieve good rankings on search engines results pages.
when writing your page/post titles, you should try as much as possible to create a title that effectively describes the topic of the page content; you should write a title that will be short and concise but will still clearly state what the page content is all about and also put your main keyword in the page/post title.
You should avoid writing titles that does not match with page content; this can make search engines to label you as a spam.
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2. Description Meta Tag
What is a description Meta tag? A descriptions Meta tag gives the search engines a summary of what a page is about. A page title may be a few words long, but a description might be one or two sentences describing the overall content of a particular page.
A description Meta tag is very important, because this is what search engines mostly use as the preview snippet for that page on Search engine result pages.
When you want to write a description for your pages/posts, you should try to write a description that will inform interest and entice users if they should see your description Meta tag as a snippet in search engine results page.
When you are writing a Description Meta tag for your pages, you should use your main keyword and other related keywords in your description; but you should avoid writing a non-related description for a page just because you want rank high on search engines, you should not fill the description with only keywords and you should make the description as short as possible (150 characters)
You should install a WordPress SEO plugin to help you with these, I prefer the All in One SEO plugin.
3. Use Search engine optimized permalinks/URL Structure
Apart from writing a good Title and description, your Permalink/URL structure is also very important. You should use URL structures that have a page content keyword in it; you should avoid using the WordPress default URL structure like your-site.com/rt2343-33.html, when you can create a good SEO URL structure like your-site.com/article-writing/ if the page is on article writing.
This will not only help your rankings, it will also make it easier for people to link to your content and easily remember your site links, people hate ugly long URLs that its even hard to remember.
If you are on WordPress, you can change your permalinks structure from your WordPress dashboard, under the settings >> Permalinks option; choose your desired permalink format, but make sure you change it from the default WordPress generic URL structure.
4. Use HTML and XML Sitemaps
A sitemap is a page with links to all of the pages on your blog. Having a sitemap on your blog can be really helpful; it makes it easy for search engine crawlers to crawl your web pages easily by following the links in the sitemap page.
For WordPress users, you can create a search engine friendly sitemap by installing Google xml sitemap plugin; this plugin does all the job and it auto updates your xml sitemap when you create a new post or page.
For the html sitemap, you should check your WordPress theme if it has a sitemap or archive page template. If it has, you can create the html sitemap page by creating a new page on your blog and selecting the sitemap page as the page template.
5. Internal Linking
Internal links are links to articles and posts within your own blog. These links are pointing to relevant pages about a particular keyword that appear in a particular page of your blog. You can achieve this by employing the service of an auto linking plugin like: SEO Smart link plugin, or SEO ALRP Plugin and many more of such Plugins.
This Plugins will automatically link keywords found in your posts to another related posts on your blog.
If you are on Blogger blogging platform, then you can do the linking manually. Also, make sure you don’t link have more than seven Links per Post, so that your post won’t just look like a link page.
6. Optimize Your Images for SEO
Images are good for SEO, in fact, images can help you rank higher for your keywords. An image will usually have a filename as well as an “alt” attribute, both of which you should take advantage of for SEO.
You should make sure that the image Filename is has a keyword that is related to the post in which you want to use the image, also, the “alt” attribute should describe the image to the fullest (but make it short).
7. Use Heading Tags Appropriately
Heading tags are used to structure your blog posts and make it more appealing to your readers, it is used to create a hierarchical structure for your content, making it easier for your readers to understand and navigate easily through your content. There are six sizes of the heading tags, which ranges from Heading 1, <h1> (the most important), to Heading 6, <h6> (the least Important).
Your blog post and page titles will naturally/automatically take the Heading 1 (<h1>) tag, but you should not stop there; you should also make use of the Heading 2 to Heading 6 to make sub headings within your posts to stand out.
This will help your SEO because Google and other search engines sees contents wrapped around the Heading tags as important contents keywords. So make sure you take advantage of this, but don’t over do it.
8. Use the robots.txt file
A “robot.txt file” controls how the search engines crawl and view your website; you can use it to tell search engines where they can access/crawl on your blog, and where they should not go. Naturally, there are some pages and directories that you should not allow search engines to crawl on your blog, these pages are usually unnecessary pages that may not be useful to users if found in search engines search result pages.
There are also some directories that you should block for security reasons. You can read this post for tips on creating your robot.txt file. You can check out This Post Robot.txt Optimization: How To Use it For your Blog for more on Robot.txt
These are the basics of On-page optimization you need to implement. Read and re-read this post, then implement it and see your blog rank more higher on Search engine result pages (SERPs).
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About Joseph Adediji
Good stuff, but I do not feel the meta description is too important, yes, it is important but bloggers can live without it.
Gautham, everything is important in SEO 😉
Of course Meta description alone isn’t very important (for example without external links), but the same situation is with other factors.
Meta description is important, when your site is on the first page of search results – it’s what you see in SERPs. And if it is better than other descriptions, people click more often. And your clickthrough rate (CTR) is better. And it matters in making ranking by Google 😉
@Joseph – great article, thanks for sharing
Thanks for your reply. But how many people are actually going to read the descriptions of the first few search results and then decide which site to enter? Google automatically pulls related text from content when someone is searching for a phrase, so most of the time, the description does not even appear.But it does give an idea for the bots about the page.
Gautham – you are right – Google sometimes shows other description than we have in meta tags. But if we have it and it’s related with post or article, G. almost always is showing description from meta.
Anyways, nice to have this chat with you, I hope you drop by my blog regularly 🙂
@Chris, thanks for the Great Response.
@Gautham, whether you believe it or not, people read the description meta that shows on SERP, in fact, I do read them also. So, it is good to optimize it to be on the safer side, it wont take you 2 minutes.
Meta descriptions are definitely important..Searchers will always read them before clicking through.
If your description does not seem relevant to the searcher then they’ll probably click your competitors link.
A good description can help you get more click when people see the result on search engines, I think that’s why it’s important element on SEO.
Wow, you hit all the right notes on this blog post! It’s all there, the meta, the alt, the XML sitemaps. The thing I need to work on is the robots.txt and your words and the blog post you linked to, helped out a lot.
Thanks for sharing great and useful stuff!
~ Jupiter Jim
Am glad I could help. 😀
Hello Joseph,
well you mentioned a Good point but i don’t think Robot.txt Optimization comes in On page SEO. It comes in basic structure of SEO of whole sites. By the way please mention the Keyword density and some other on page factors too.
Hey Shahid!
Keyword density has been a controversial issue for a Long Time, I will just advice a keyword density of about 3%. As you know that over optimization is not allowed in this erá.
Well done Joseph.
I love what you said up there, ” You must not be a SEO Guru before one can have a basic understanding of Search Engines Optimization (SEO), You finished everything on this topic, thanks once more for the note man..
Hi Joseph,
Great guidelines you’ve laid out in the above post. I would say with the basics of onpage SEO – You’ve hit the nail on the head. And one of the most important things to do and to have is a well updated Robots.txt file – especially with you have certain content that you don’t want to be indexed by search engines – This is extremely important and can offer the option of sharing content and not have it devalue your site.
Well, I think if you believe in SEO you better switch to Yoast instead all-in-one-seo.
I still remember the day when all-in-one-seo plugin had messed up my blog. And Harsh have suggested me to use Yoast, that time Yoast was new to me and I was like, what the _ plugin he have given me. But now I’m thankful to him that he have suggested such a nice plugin to use.
Choosing a SEO plugin is a matter of Personal Conviction. I have used Yoast on my site before and it Scattered my blog SEO.
I always recommend All In One because of its simplicity and effectiveness. though I use Yoast on a few of my sites, but I dont usually recommend it.
Hi Joseph,
I have heard from tons of SEO articles that optimizing images are necessary, but I actually don’t know how to perfectly optimize it. Have I put use the post title as a image Filename?
Hi Ehsan,
there are two things that is important in image optimization:
1. The image file name and 2. The image alt tag.
Always name your image with the keyword you are targeting, and also enter the keyword as the alt tag. For example, if you have a post on “CHICKEN FLU”, and You want to put and image of a chicken infected with flu; you will name the image “chiken flu” on your desktop and also use “chicken flu” as the alt tag if your target keyword is chicken flu.
Yes, its a perfect article for onpage SEO & people know it but its bit difficult to optimize this way if you want to write good contents. We should try to optimize by not loosing the grip of the article. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks Joseph for sharing this very important article…
Really I’ve found out that optimizing your blog for success takes time and dedication… I’m really enjoying my All in One SEO plugin because of it’s simplicity and effectiveness.
I make use of SEO Smart Images plugin for optimizing my images on my blog and I also will recommend it.
Thanks
Hey Joseph
I would like to ask a question that Which heading tags are best to use in a blog post h1 or h2 or h3 and how much heading tags should we use and what is the proper way of writing a meta tag please explain??
Naturally, you post title should be h1 heading, so You should use the h2 heading tags for headings in your post and h3 for sub-headings (headings under another heading). For meta tags, just make sure you have your target keyword in it and if possible make it the first word or at worst the second word in the meta description.
Title and Description are very important but most of the Newbies do a mistake by writing long titles and description. Try to be in the limit because if you write more characters then Search engine will not index extra characters. Such As Google index around 56-60 characters(with space) in Title.
luckily I am following all the points including the meta tag description. Yes, we should use meta tag description, if we blog for real people. Btw I too personally use yoast as it has many features and it does great work. I think you should write on off page optimisation too, so that I can compare from you what I am doing lol. Great post mate
I mostly concentrate on Page titles and keywords similar to page titles. But I used to always miss formatting keyword inside the post, which is pretty bad seo technique, so I guess after reading this article, I can implement certain changes onto my blog. Thanks for the share.
Really very helpful post about On-page optimization SEO. Submitting sitemap to search engine and using meta description on a blog is very helpful for on page SEO. Nice post.
Hi Joseph
Awesome post Joseph and how about re=”nofollow” attribute for external links.
Hello
Joseph Adediji
thnx for this complete guide abut on page seo for bloggers…seo is one of the ,most important thing for bloggers and u have described it completely here it will helps me alot 🙂
Simple but yet effective basic tips for on page SEO. Nice read. I think that proper use of tags are mainly important 🙂