SEO Tips for Blogs: Blogger and WordPress // Part 1

Good Morning.

Here I am with my promised post about SEO. I have previously written a post on SEO tips for blogs, but I’ve learnt a bit more since then. I’ve put together a quick and easy checklist you can use to start using SEO on your blog.

Please read the #socialbloggers post for a bit more background info abut SEO and why it’s important!

I’ve decided to do this in a few parts, because upon writing this, I realised that it’s a lot heavier than I expected! So I don’t overwhelm you all, I’ll split it up.

1. Have you edited your URL? 

This is something that I completely overlooked. I used blogger for over a year without even checking out the ‘permalink’ tab in it’s post editor. Turns out, you can very quickly and easily edit the URL of the blog post you’re writing.

If you don’t edit the URL, it will automatically generate a URL based on your blog post title. Your blog post title may not be relevant to the product.

For example – you might have the title as ‘Guess what I finally bought!’ and the product is a Naked 3 palette. So, you might want to edit the URL to read ‘naked-3-palette-review’. It’s said that URL’s are one of the main factors Google will take into consideration when pulling up websites/blogs in a search.

Some quick tips when editing your URL:

• The shorter the better.
• It should describe your content.
• Hyphens separate words best.
• Use all lower case letters.

Watch out! Never go back and edit previous URLs. As soon as you do this, any previous links to your blog post, any links used it on social media or any times you have linked a blog post in other posts will all become broken! 

Check out this post: SEO Tools With A Free Trial

2. Have you used a keyword rich title?

Google will give the first few words of your title the most weighting, so you should be thinking of this as you write your title.

Let’s stick with the Naked 3 example. Rather than having your title as ‘Guess what I finally bought!’, you might want to use something like ‘Naked 3 Palette: I finally bought it!’.

‘Naked 3 Palette Review’ would be the perfect optimised title, but you might want to be a little more creative with your title to make it more catchy to humans, not just search engines. Here are a few variations:

• Why I hate the Naked 3 Palette.
• Naked 3 Palette’s top 3 shades.
• 10 reasons you need to buy the Naked 3 Palette.
• Naked 3 Palette make-up looks.
• Pro’s and Con’s of the Naked 3 Palette
• Naked 3 palette : Why you need it in your life.

Watch out! You should always always write your titles with the intention of them being catchy so people are more likely to click on them in bloglovin/social media/your home page etc. If you can’t get a keyword in without spoiling the title, leave it out. It’s not the end of the world! You’re writing for humans over search engines, so if you can’t get it in, don’t force it!

3. Have you edited your search description?

This is a funny old one. So, you can edit the search description in both Blogger and WordPress. I use the SEO Yoast plugin to do it on WordPress:

This is the description that will show up in search under your post title, you should enter a short description using keywords in here. So, if it is a review of a certain product, and you would like people to find your blog post when they are searching such things as ‘review of certain product’.

Although you need to realise that just because you write something in this box, doesn’t mean that it will always show up in the search box. It depends on what people search for.

What Google does, is it pulls up the search words and highlights them in bold for the user. So if your search description does not match the keywords the user has entered into Google, it will automatically pull up a snippet of your blog post that does.

Look at this example of the same blog post.

This is the description I added in my blog post:

Now, depending on what I search, I get two different results. I optimised this page towards the keyword: Re:Active Diet Pills Review.

When I Googled ‘Re:Active Diet Pills Review’ this is what I saw:

Google pulled up the description as it contained the keywords that were searched.

When I searched ‘Re:Active T5/Black Review’, which is one of the two types of diet pills I reviewed in this post, it pulled up a different section for the description snippet.

So just remember to enter keywords that you want/expect people to be searching for when they find your blog post!

OK. We’ll leave it there for now guys. Hopefully I’ve given you enough food for thought until my next SEO tips for blogs post!