10 actionable tips to make your personal blog SEO friendly. Beginners guide

The number of personal blogs is soaring. Especially amidst COVID, a hefty amount of new blogs started popping up in all parts of the globe. According to an estimate, the number of bloggers raised to 3.75 million in the United States in 2020. The number is gigantic, and competition is immense.

Businesses and people alike are striving for an online presence. Not only building a presence but growing it. Blogs, vlogs, and podcasts are a great way to build, grow and sustain an online presence. However, the competition can be apprehended from the fact that every day, 2.75 million blogs are being published on WordPress blogs alone.

Why is search engine optimization necessary?

The moto behind this long intro is to get you up to pace about the competition. Taking practical measures is necessary to appear above the competition. Letting search engines know about what you can offer to the searchers is essential.  To achieve that, making the website search engine ready is vital.

Search engine optimization is actions that make a website accessible and rankable for the search engines. SEO is essential for businesses websites, eCommerce websites, and personal blogging platforms alike. The importance of optimizing the site helps site owners to:

• Rank higher on the search engine results page.
• Attract free organic traffic to the website.
• Promote the business.
• Gain a competitive edge over other businesses.
• Attract the traffic that is genuinely interested in the services or content offered by the website.
• Get conversion at low costs.
• Improve the authority of the website.
• Make the business/blog standout amongst the rest of the competitors.

This article focuses on helping you rank your website or personal blog higher on the search engine ranking pages. Search engine optimization might sound a bit technical, especially if your background is not from information technology or computer science. But this article will help you optimize your site or blog as a beginner.

We will now consider the top 10 actionable steps that personal bloggers can take to make their website search engine optimized or, as the pros say, SEO friendly.

1.      Meta Tags

There are millions of products and millions of webpages catering to various topics. Search engine algorithms focus on delivering the most relevant results to a search query. Keeping your blog related to a specific niche is essential to attract traffic genuinely interested in your offering.

You can tell the search engine about your webpages’ niche by adding Meta tags. So, in beginner terms, Meta tags tell the search engine’s crawlers about your website’s niche. Here’s how you can add Meta tags for specific webpages.

1. Install the SEO plugin Yoast to the WordPress website.
2. Add metadata to the page.
3. Publish the page.

2.      Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are short sentences or phrases that appear below your web page’s title when search engines index the page on SERP against a query. The length of the Meta description should not exceed 160 characters. You can add Meta description to a WordPress website via a plugin like Yoast.

3.      Keyword

Keywords are essential if not crucial in ranking efforts of a personal blog. As a niche-specific blog, using the right keyword is necessary. As a business, using keywords with good impact and high search volume is essential. Website owners can generally assess the targeted audience with keyword research.

Design and craft your content around the keyword. Make sure of the following aspect while crafting your content.

• Content is focused on the keyword.
• Content offers value to the readers.
• Add graphics and pictures to the content to make it attractive.
• Adding or embedding videos is also a good idea to shine more light on the keyword-focused content.
• Make sure that your content is actionable and offers value to the visitors.

4.      Keyword placement

The keyword placement strategy holds immense importance. Try to add keywords at relevant places. The places that are most suited for the implementation of keywords is given below.

• Add a keyword or focus phrase in the URL of the page.
• Add a keyword in the title of the page.
• Keyword or focus phrase addition in the headers is encouraged.
• Keyword use in the text in the opening paragraph and towards the end is also essential.

5.      Optimization for mobile devices

Currently, most of the searches are being made from mobile devices. So, to deliver a great user experience, owners/site managers must optimize the mobile devices’ website. Otherwise, the bounce rate might soar even if your content is precious. Mobile optimization can be achieved by using SEO tools from Cognizantt.

6.      Image Compression

In order to improve the site loading time, it is essential to compress the images that are being used on the blog post or the website. You can do that by simply downloading the WordPress plugins like Smush and Resmush. Image compression will help reduce the web page size and help reduce the website loading time.

7.      Content structures

It is sometimes given the least importance. But it is one of the crucial factors in onsite SEO, also a straightforward one as well. The content must be structured appropriately. Follow the following steps to structure your content.Start with the table of contents.

1. Hyperlink the headings and contents.
2. Use proper heading tags.
3. H1 for title
4. H2 for headings and orderly arrange all the headers as well.
5. Try to add a conclusion at the end.
6. Use lists, tables, and bullet points to elaborate the content.

7.      Internal Links

Link building is essential, and it is not just limited to external links leading to the website. Internal linking will help the search engine to know more about your website. So, it is an easy and good practice to use internal links in your content.

8.      External link

Earning external links leading to your site is vital. The more the number of links leading back to your site, the more authority your site will have in search engine rankings. You can get backlinks by publishing a guest post on useful websites. For example, if you have an entertainment niche then you can publish content with a follow backlink on entertainment news websites.

Try and reach out to the websites in your niche with good authority. Backlinking tells the search engine that your website has authentic content that people take an interest in

9.      Monitor your website

Once you have applied the basics, it is time to evaluate the results. Several tools can help you with various statistics and analytics. The stats can help you identify which strategy has worked and which method failed. Authority Labs, Data for SEO, and Google Analytics are the best analytical tools to analyze the traffic and other statistics like bounce rate, retention, and page views.