Congratulations! You’ve built your website, and started working on your blog. If that hasn’t happened yet, how does it feel to hear that? Sadly many of our customers who come to us advise that when they were sold a website that they did not know that they had to market it, or that it wouldn’t automatically reach page one on search engines or could be found easily.
So today we’re going to cover how you can optimise your blog, at least once you’ve got all of that material optimised with our SEO content template. If you’ve not already used our guide on creating content with SEO in mind, or are new to SEO, check out our article below. Otherwise let’s jump in!
Structure your titles
The title of your blog post is immediately what we call a H1 title, of which there should only be one on a web page or blog post. All subsequent H titles should be H2 or under in size, you still get the same effect in terms of breaking up your text, but this way you do not confuse search results with which should be displayed first.
Optimise your images
We would always recommend you use your own images, properly sized to reduce the speed of your mobile loading speeds. For context, Google advises that the average loading speed for a website on mobile or tablet device is roughly 2 seconds. This means you need to ensure that your images are compressed so the loading speed is less on mobile devices, but you can also check this by selecting the button for desktop view, then changing it to mobile or tablet. Think carefully about how much space you want to take up when considering that the most frequently used device to access the internet is mobile phones, more so than desktops.
The other major factor you need to know about images is that each image you choose for your website has the capacity to rank for a keyword. Google’s spiders (which crawls your website to see if you rank for a keyword) cannot see what an image actually is, and so the file name is displayed in the code of your website instead. You can optimise your image before uploading by calling the file keywords you wish to rank for. Alternatively depending on the plan you are on with WordPress (this feature is not accessible for those on the basic or premium plan) you are able to add alt text to the image which changes the description for you. Select the image in the block editor, and the above options will appear. Describe your image with keywords or what the purpose of the image is for. Whilst you are at it, you can also…
Add HTML anchors
There are a few benefits to doing this both in website design and SEO. For website design, this means you can add a link to this part of the page. So were you to select an area of text or create a contents page, you could link to this part of the page which can be more aesthetically pleasing to be able to break up huge amounts of text.
From an SEO point of view this offers the chance to add a description of the image if you haven’t already done this with your file name. As Google and other search engines can only crawl what the file is called or described as, there’s another chance to slot a keyword you are trying to rank for in here. Whilst we’re on the subject of the advanced section…
Link relationships
This is only applicable for links, so if you are creating links to other areas of your site then I’d recommend you click the link in question, then head to the advanced section we’ve gone to to for HTML anchors. Here you’ll see a different option for link relationships, and similarly to HTML anchors you can advise search engine spiders on what the link you have created goes to. This promotes trust with the algorithm and can help improve your domain authority score.
If you’re unsure on your domain authority score…