A skilled blogger will be able to write superb content without any conscious focus on SEO but will still receive lots of links, especially if they are writing about a specific niche. These blogs will concentrate more on the following areas:
- High-quality content
- Being well designed and well presented
- Building a community
- Sharing the content on social media
If you are hitting the mark in these areas, then you are well on the way to creating content that is great for SEO. However, if you want to take it to the next level, you may wish to employ the services of an SEO agency in Bangkok. Here are few simple hints and tips that SEO bloggers frequently miss but search engine optimisers know the importance of and value.
Add Internal Links
Many bloggers are concerned about adding internal links as they think it could easily be perceived as “black hat” practices or “Page Rank Sculpting”. However, that isn’t the case; the objective is to encourage people to spend more time on your website. Try to grab the attention of people who have landed on your blog by doing a more innocuous search and try to persuade them to read other blogs or pages on your site.
Your style of writing may appeal to that reader, so the objective is to make it as easy as possible for people to read more of your content. A sidebar with links to other recent articles is one method which has been proven to reduce bounce rates. The downside with a sidebar is that some pieces won’t be relevant to the article that the visitor landed on.
A better method is to link to related articles. For example, if you are reviewed a movie or a product or even made comparisons to something else that you have reviewed previously, you should insert an internal link to it. These forms of link are likely to be far more relevant to reader than content in a sidebar. Don’t give the reader the excuse to visit a different site to find the review or content that they want! You know your content better than anyone, so what better person will be able to find old posts?
The Do’s and Don’ts of Internal Linking
- If you haven’t got a relevant link that you can add in your post, use this as a map to your next article.
- Try to be descriptive and specific with your anchor text. Use hyperlinks such as “Starbucks Emporium Review” rather than arbitrary anchor text such as “reviewed last week”. This way, the reader will then know precisely what they will see when they click on the link. So long as you are not buying links or abusing automation, it is unlikely that you will be over-optimising.
- Don’t overdo it! If you insert too many links, your text can become hard to read, and people will start to overlook the links.
- Don’t focus solely on internal links; good quality external links will be a useful resource for readers. You will also show up in the referring sites analytics, which will make them aware of you too!
Optimise Images
Many blogs written for non-SEO niches have some stunning images. You can see what type of optimisation has been done on the image by right-clicking on the image in Chrome and selecting “inspect image”. Easily Pinnable images are fantastic as sites such as Pinterest are excellent sources of traffic, especially for fashion or beauty sites.
However, many other things can be done, such as ensuring that the file name makes sense to both humans and Google. The alt text should also let the reader and Google know what the image is rather than merely referring back to the title of the blog.
The Do’s and Don’ts of Image Optimisation
- Be descriptive with the image file names.
- Alt text is valuable, so use words that Google will recognise as this will help your image to rank in search results.
- Make sure that the photos are relevant to post and use keywords to describe to photo.
- Avoid using image file names and alt text for keyword stuffing as it is necessary and will be picked up upon by Google.
Long-Tail Keyword Research
The best bloggers are fantastic at intuiting the subjects that their audience wants to read about. The writer will read comments on their blogs to understand what readers are looking for. Often they have a knack of finding the best keywords and don’t even rely on keyword tools.
If you fall into this category for topic ideas that is wonderful but using a keyword tool to get long-tail keywords will help you to rank higher for more far-reaching keyword searches. Google no longer offers a keyword tool for people without an AdWords account. However, by using Google suggest, you will be able to get some great ideas for long-tail keywords.
For instance, if you are searching for a specific topic, let’s say “French Cuisine Recipes”. Using a keyword planner, it quickly becomes apparent that “French food” has almost treble the search volume of “French cuisine”.
So, if you are writing a blog post on recipes from France, it would be more appropriate to use the keywords “French food recipes”. “French food” is not a long-tail keyword but “French food recipes” is and you will also get some other suggestions such as “traditional French food recipes”. If you get an idea of these terms before you start writing, it will be far easier to build them into your text. Including these keywords into H1 and H2 Headings will also be beneficial.
The Do’s and Don’ts of Long-Tail Keywords
- Using long-tail keywords to build on your content is great. You may include something that you may have otherwise left out, or you could expand on a point that you have already made.
- Use long-tail keywords in subheadings, image file names and meta descriptions. They don’t need to be restricted to the regular text.
- Like with any keywords, stuffing should always be avoided and is easily detected by Google. It also makes your content harder to read and is boring for the reader!