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How do you make your blog posts stand out from the thousands of articles and new web pages which are published every day? Good quality content is a great way of getting people engaged with your blog topic, but only if they can find you in the first place. You don’t need to be an expert in search engine optimisation (SEO) to get readers to your blog. But if you understand the basics, it might help you craft your postings in a way which doesn’t undermine your style, but helps you get noticed too.

What is SEO?

SEO is all about getting your blog posts noticed by the major search engines like Bing and Google. Search engines use software to look at all the pages on the internet and rank them on a range of quality indicators. If you have a rough idea of how this ranking is done, then you can help the software by giving it the information it needs to decide whether your blog is high quality.

Topic

The first thing to consider when sitting down to write a post is what your aim is. Having a plan about what you want to get across is going to allow you to write a more effective post.

Structure

Search engines can tell how readable text is – a long block of text which isn’t broken up into paragraphs with subheadings is going to rank more poorly than text with short sentences, an introduction, conclusion and clear sections.

Keyword

Choose a strong search term which sums up what your page is about. This will allow people searching for that term to be directed to your page. Try to avoid using the same keyword every time as the search engine will interpret this as each of your pages competing with every other page. Mention your keyword a few times through the article but don’t go overboard and mention it in every sentence.

Learn to Use Tags

Tags are other terms which are related to your post, but aren’t the sole focus of the article. For example, if you were writing about penguins, you’d use “penguin” as your focus keyword. Your tags might be terms like South Pole, Antarctica, Gentoo, Rockhopper or flightless birds.

Giving Your Article a Title

Search engines first use the title to work out what a page is about, so it’s important to use your focus keyword in the title, preferably at the start.

Meta-Description

This is the short box of text displayed on a search engine to tell you what a web page is about. It should summarise the main points of the page, and encourage readers to click through to the full page.

Images

Adding images makes your content more engaging for the reader. Add a short description of the image, known as alt-text.

Links

The final thing to think about is adding some links, either to trusted sites elsewhere on the internet or other pages on your own site which explain an issue in greater detail, or give more information on a related topic.