5 SEO Tips for Blogs

About 4 months after I was trained as a SEO specialist, I want to have a website where I could experiment my SEO techniques and ideas at. I can’t make my client’s websites as my testing area, not a professional thing to do for me.

With my 6 years of experience as a SEO specialist and working online as a freelance, plus as a blogger for 5 years, some fellow bloggers ask me how to SEO their blogs, how to gain rankings, and so on.

Sadly, I can’t just teach them and feed them my bread and butter, I can’t give you guys what I’ve learned so hard for 6 years in offering SEO services to my clients. But I can share you a couple of tips to help you boost your blog and implement at least a bit of optimization on your blog!

These are pretty simple to follow. If you really love your blog, have the passion to do it, this is no sweat! But maybe this is something to remind you and keep you on track, to keep you motivated to keep you doing what you do. And they are:

What do you want to write about?

We have different styles of writing. Some of us write the body of the article first before the title (that’s what I do sometimes), and some of us write the title first then the content (what I’ve been doing lately) but what’s important is that, keep your content within the topic.

Don’t talk about umbrellas, your outfit, or your life story when you’re talking about “top tourist destinations”. Sure, you may mention those words but don’t make a huge part of your article totally different from what is the intended topic.

Put yourself on your reader’s shoes.

With what’s said above, think about your readers. If they’d want to know about your outfit when they just want to know the top tourist destinations.

Also, don’t make it too long that it will take for them to finish. It’s like an old Filipino telenovela that will runs 2 – 3 years and ends up to one same ending.

Write at least 300 words article.

I use to write at least 300 words article for my blogs, but that was back then 2011. It never seems to be enough that’s why these days I write at least 400 words, but this is not a big problem if you know what you want to write, what you want to say, just like how I am writing this article now.

But why write at least 300 words? Because search engines like Google can read it. Google loves content, some SEO even says “content is king” when it comes to SEO. But think about it, Google can’t read photos other than the alt text you place within the image code. So how will Google know what you’re talking about, what’s the photo all about?

Link to your previous content.

This one is simple, it’s just simply referring or linking your latest article to your previous relevant articles. Like this for example, we’re talking about blogging here but do you know you can take advantage of blogging to boost your career? – that’s a link right there!

Why link to your previous, old content? Technically that’s called internal linking, your sending links within your blog, referring articles you have on your blog that talks about that topic, and search engines then finds out that “Oh! That’s what it is really talking about” and not think of it as is if it’s just another content on your blog. Plus, you can refer your readers to your previous interesting articles, and I’ll bet you want to click on that link – I mean, come on! You don’t want to boost your career?

Update regularly.

This is easy, especially if you’re passionate with your niche. What’s hard with travel is that you need to go somewhere, spend at least a day to be able to blog about it, experience it to be able to share and write articles about it. Sure, you can do research about it and write what you search about, but it can just take for you to write an hour or less to write something you’ve experience, comparing to something you have to search for. Just like this article, I am able to finish this within 30 minutes.

But anyway, updating your blog regularly helps your readers have something to look forward to, to read and hear from you. Plus, it helps search engines to understand that you have fresh content, and you’re a great source about this type of niche since you’re updated. This is actually in connection to Google’s “Freshness Update” which I was able to test years ago to my old blog (blog A) that I haven’t update for 3 months, comparing to my travel blog (blog B) that I update every week. Blog A dramatically lost its PR (when it was alive back then), ranking, and even traffic.

How often can you update your blog? As often as you want, but make sure it's something you can do, not something that will only just frustrate you. Usually, daily update is great for those blogs with multiple of writers, as for me I update my main blog at least once a week, and this blog at least once a month (which I haven't done lately by the way). If that's still too much, you can do once a month, but that is too slow, you can do better!

That’s pretty much it. That’s the main SEO tips for your blog from me. There are a lot to implement of course to optimize your blog, but this will totally help you.