The Science of Blogging SEO An Astek Academy To-Do List

Keywords

• Use the Bing/Google Adwords Keyword Tools to find keyword (KW) phrases for your post. Use those with high volume, low competition that your target audience will use to find you.

• Know that different topics will attract a different audience. • Use KWs in H1 and H2 tags (headline fonts) for increased SEO. • Place KW phrases in the URL and Page Title. • Use KW phrases in the first paragraph and throughout your post that feel natural for the reader. • Make sure that when you use a KW phrase it never seems forced or arbitrary. Search engines will

penalize you for “over-optimizing” or “keyword-stuffing.” Besides, it can be alienating to readers. • The “keyword” field in older Wordpress versions is useless. • Use KWs in the Alt-image Tag when inserting images. • When inserting links, put the hyperlink on the keywords (that’s called the anchor text).

Formatting

• Style choices can help readability (bullets, sub-headings) - Search engines need help to scan faster. • Avoid large images. Use JPGs for smaller sizes. Search engines dislike long load-times. • Link to relevant blog posts. Google gives a small SEO boost to linked content, even if done internally. • Length does NOT matter to SEO. Quality content matters. Substantial posts that are valuable to a

reader will be read, referenced, linked to and shared. That is the whole point of your blog. Title and Meta Description

• Make sure your page title is: o Direct, succinct and attention-getting o Descriptive of the content o KW-rich. It’s slightly more effective for SEO to place the KWs earlier in the title o Avoid generic phrases or titles, e.g. “A Word to the Wise”

• Write a unique meta description for the post to promote content sharing. Otherwise, social platforms and Google will pull the content from elsewhere on the site when users share your content.

• Note that meta descriptions are NOT used for Search SEO. • Use the page title (and thus relevant KWs) in the URL. Remove articles and prepositions to decrease

length and increase search-ability. Categories and Tags

• What’s the difference? o Categories are broad groupings within your site, whereas tags denote specific content. For

example, a food blogger may post a recipe for cake with the categories “dessert” and “baking” and the tags might be “cake,” “frosting,” and “chocolate”

• Use categories/tags to make your blog more organized and easier for users to navigate between posts. • Avoid having too many categories/tags. Less is better and makes for easier site searching. • Note that if your category is in the post URL, a KW category name is ideal. • Tags are not used for search engine SEO, but help with the reader experience.

Google Authorship

• Sign up for Authorship and link your blog to your G+ profile page and vice-versa.

Backlinks

• Promote your post! search engines place more relevance on posts that are linked to from other sites.

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