7 Best SEO Practices For Blogging in 2022
About 75% of all search engine traffic goes through Google.
When you have a blog, you can make use of SEO techniques to help boost your placement on Google’s search results.
Let’s have a look at 7 of the best SEO practices for blogging (and yes, we at DYB Virtual can do them all for you!)
1. Effective Use of Titles and Headings
Most of the time when people are going to read blogs, they’re looking for good content that is going to help them.
When people see titles that are related to what they’re trying to get done, they will stick around longer.
This is important for SEO because if someone clicks on your blog and then leaves after a few seconds, it’s bad for SEO.
Specifically, it’s bad because Google will think that your content isn’t worth finding, and will push you down in ranking.
One thing we do well at DYB Virtual is write titles and headings that are attractive and good for SEO.
2. Optimize Your Images
You are going to want to have images with your blogs – a good blog will have at least one image to attract the eye.
This will be known as your featured image, and it will be prominently featured in the article.
It might even have the title of your article written on it in some way, which might be good to keep your audience.
However, what you also need to know about images is that you can’t just have any sized image and have it be okay.
If the size of your image (as a file size, that is) is too large, it will make it take longer for your blog to load.
People are busy and they don’t want to wait a long time for sites to load, so if they see one taking a while, they click away.
This again will hurt your SEO as Google and other search engines will take notice.
We will make a good sized featured image for you that will be attractive and even feature your article title.
3. Better Meta Descriptions
On any given blog, you are going to have the chance to write a meta description.
This will be the text that people see when they find your blog through search engines, especially Google.
It’s important that you have a good meta description, as someone skimming the description is considering the following:
Do I want to read that article?
The title will help to get them interested but it’s the meta description that will really sell them on the article.
If you just let the blog automatically fill in the meta description from your first paragraph, that usually won’t be enough.
You need to tell people what your blog is about in a pretty short manner so they have a reason to click on it.
Even though meta description doesn’t directly affect SEO, people clicking or not clicking certainly will.
We write meta descriptions for you with the essence of the articles written in just under 160 characters, the maximum recommended.
4. Use Target Keyword Research
It’s useful when you have keywords that people are interested in searching – that’s how they find your blogs, after all.
When you’re considering what you should write about, you should use SEO tools that give you valuable search information.
This information will be everything from how often words are searched to related words that may be more popular.
If you start by basing your blogs on the more popular search terms, you will improve your SEO.
5. Include Internal Links
One thing that search engines like to see on any given web site is links – they take you from one page to another.
They especially like to see internal links, to show that your web site is connected, so to speak.
When you write a blog, you should think about other blogs that you have written that are related to that blog.
You can even sprinkle links to other pages on your site throughout the blog, if you’d like.
DYB Virtual will always add a few internal links to relevant pages and other blogs that are on your site.
6. Use Semantic HTML
Semantic HTML might seem like a bit of a confusing term, but what it basically means is that you should use formatting that Google likes.
For example, you might want to make text font size bigger in some places, but Google prefers that you use H headers instead.
That marks the text to be larger without using old ways, so to speak, that Google doesn’t agree with anymore.
DYB Virtual is always on the up and up when it comes to Semantic HTML and we will make your blogs look great!
7. Make It User Friendly For Desktop And Mobile Devices
Lastly, remember to make sure that your blogs can be read both on desktop and mobile devices.
It’s well and good if you make a good blog that looks nice on desktops, but if it looks bad on mobile devices, you’re pushing away a large amount of possible customers.
These will be the people who mostly look at blogs from their phone or tablet and rarely do any blog reading on their computer.
Take the time to see that your file sizes are small and that your pictures have alt text.
The purpose of alt text is partially to help people who are vision impaired get the meaning of the images without seeing them. It also helps the search engines “read” the images.
DYB Virtual checks blogs to see how they look on desktop and mobile devices for you and will always use alt text!
Quick Recap:
- Make sure that you have effective titles and headings so that people stay to read your article and search engines push up your ranking
- Optimize your images, so that your blogs don’t take too long to load and people quickly click off
- Make use of a better meta description so that people will have a good reason to click on your blog from search.
- To find good topics for your articles, make use of keyword research and boost your SEO
- Include internal links so that people will stay on your page longer and improve your SEO
- Use Semantic HTML to help give Google the idea that you wrote your blogs well and properly
- Make your blog user friendly for desktop and mobile devices so that everyone will be able to read your blogs