What is SEO and How Does it Work?
When I first started blogging, I got tired of hearing about SEO in a quick hurry. It seemed overwhelming, and I had a million other things to learn that seemed way more important.
SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization, and it is really important — more important than most things new bloggers spend their time on. It’s not their fault. All the other shiny things are WAY more fun! I’ll attest to that right now. But I’ll tell you what, learning SEO tips and tricks will pay off over and over again!
Google will find and index your blog easier, and send you traffic faster, if you put some effort into SEO right from the start. Bing and Yahoo are also search engines, but Google is the king. They have a common goal to serve their people well.
Searchers are their people, and as you can imagine, Google probably gets a million trillion visits a day from searchers. That’s not a number, but it gives you the big idea. Google (and its minions) want to send people to the right place when they have a question or need help.
Google bots are constantly crawling the web in search of the best content to provide the people. No one knows exactly how Google puts sites on the front page, but there are some clues. And good SEO practices will certainly help. Complicated algorithms and Google magic are behind the rest of it.
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The Magic of Keywords
Keywords are simply the words and terms people use to search for whatever they’re looking for. If I type in “how to ride a unicycle,” I get the following result on the SERP page (Search Engine Results Page).
As you can see, I’ve pointed out with red (very squiggly) markings, the keywords that came up as a result of my search. A keyword sounds like it’s just one word, but the term actually means one or more words (or a phrase) that someone might type into a search engine when looking for information.
Google also gives us alternative terms and search questions (queries) that have been used to search the topic. These related terms and queries are a gold mine for finding great keywords to optimize our blogs and posts for SEO.
The Best SEO Blog Tips for Beginners
These tips will help your overall site to be more Google and user friendly. For now, we’ll just tackle some simple changes you can make on your blog’s website to optimize SEO. We will learn how to optimize posts and other things another time. Let’s get started.
SEO Optimizing for Your Dashboard
**This first SEO task is best done with a brand new site where you haven’t published any posts yet. You can still implement this SEO tip if you have published posts, but I URGE you to read this guide about the proper steps to take so you don’t end up with a lot of broken links!
#1. Set up your blog’s permalinks correctly. This is how your posts, blog pages, and all other content on your site displays in the URL box at the top of your computer screen (the https://www.blahblahblah).
In a new WordPress site, the default option is usually check marked. You do not want the URL showing up as www.yoursitename/?y=223. You want to go into your dashboard and choose the option that shows your site name and the title of your post or page.
Go to Settings, then choose Permalinks, and click by “Post Name” to reset this permalink structure. Don’t forget to click save changes at the bottom. This simple change is a major SEO best practice for your whole site and every post you publish…. moving on.
If you’re not on WordPress, make sure your permalinks look good. If they need changing, contact tech support and ask how to best do that without causing harm to your established links.
If you’re an established blog and want to use this SEO blog tip to change your Permalink structure, you may want a tech savvy person to do it for you. Grayson Bell over at iMark Interactive is great, and he doesn’t overcharge for tech help!
#2. Install Yoast SEO optimizing software (plugin) if you’re in WordPress. Weebly, Squarespace, and other platforms will have their own SEO optimizing tools. Yoast is THE go-to SEO plugin for blogs. It offers easy SEO tips within your posts to optimize for keywords and readability etc.
Go into your dashboard, click on Plugins, then click Add New, and type in Yoast SEO in the search bar on the right. It will most likely show up as your first choice, select it and choose activate.
#3. Make sure your search engine visibility box is on the right setting. You want your site to always allow search engines to index it/your blog. This may be the quickest SEO blog trick to use — just check this important setting, and you’re on your way!
In your dashboard, click Settings, then click Reading, and at the bottom you’ll see “Search Engine Visibility.” Make sure that box that says “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is NOT checked.
** Brand new to Pinterest for business and marketing? I can help. Sign up on the form below for your FREE Beginner’s Pinterest Guide!
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Make Good Use of Keywords
#4. Consider a keyword in your domain name and/or title of your blog. Definitely not necessary — but worth mentioning, to get a little SEO benefit. It’s a pain to change your domain name once you’ve got a well-established blog, but if you’re just starting out, you might consider it. This isn’t to say that an unnatural, keyword-stuffed domain name is a good idea…not so!
If you’ve chosen a tight niche (a travel blog about one city or one country, for example), it may make sense to add that primary focus word into your domain or blog name. Always do this in a natural way — i.e. “theparisexperience.com” is natural, and “parisguide.com” is possibly too “commercial” or spammy in nature.
If you focus mainly on budgeting, then maybe a title or domain with some form of the word “budget” makes sense. It will certainly give Google a big heads-up on what your blog is about.
Again, if you can do it naturally, and it fits with your brand goals, it’s worth considering. Blogging and SEO go hand-in-hand, but user experience is king. This takes priority over a keyword in your name every time!
#5. Use keywords in your blog’s description or tagline. For WordPress users, you’ll find the Tagline box in Settings, then General, and it will be right under your Site Title. It asks you to explain what the site is about. Here’s what I have in mine:
“Start a business or blog, improve productivity, and simplify money and home life.”
You could also put something like “Blogging about XYZ…” or “Blog about XYZ” etc. Use keywords that will be found in the content of your blog so Google will have more hints to send people your way when they’re looking for great stuff about “XYZ.”
This technical stuff can be confusing. Hang in there, this next SEO tip is the halfway point. =)
#6. Use keywords when you’re setting up your categories and menu topics. The term “find your zen” may not be as effective as “wellness.” Avoid using quirky wording and terms for menus and categories; use clear keywords that accurately describe your content, instead.
#7. Use the footer area (very bottom of your page) of your website for extra SEO optimization. You can insert a little blurb about your blog or its mission. *Don’t be unnatural, or use the same phrase as your blog tagline.
Google is very smart, and frowns on trying to game the system with excessive keywords and terms used over and over again. You want to be natural and descriptive — this gives readers a little more insight into the focus of your blog. What makes them happy, makes Google happy.
Depending on your theme and platform, you’ll need to find how to edit your footer. You can always try YouTube…it knows everything!
Here’s what mine looks like. At the end, I state my blog’s mission using a few similar keywords that are in my tagline.
Improve Your Readers’ Experience with Other Simple SEO Tips and Tricks
#8. You’ll definitely want to make sure your site is mobile responsive. Google is a stickler for user experience, and this is a huge part of that. Most people browse the internet on phones and tablets these days, and your site and/or theme must look good on small screens.
Google is great with helping bloggers optimize for SEO, and offers a super easy way to find out how responsive our blog is. Type your URL into Google’s test site here.
#9. Your site’s loading speed is a big deal to people and therefore a big deal to Google. It’s one of those SEO blog tips you definitely shouldn’t ignore! If you have dozens of oversize images, too many plugins (or resource-heavy plugins), or a hosting service that performs poorly…among other things, your site may take a long time to load.
Type your site’s URL here for Google’s PageSpeed Insights and see how you score.
**A quick word about web hosting. There are several huge names out there, so I won’t pretend you don’t know about the biggest one (or two). I will say that they are NOT all equal in service, quality, or speed.
Since #9 and #10 in this post can be affected quite a bit by who you use, I’m going to come out and say that I switched both of my sites to SiteGround this year. They have 5 major data centers around the world to deliver your website’s files to your visitor’s browser in no time.
They also provide free SSL security certificates (which is next on our list) to all customers, and they renew each year for free. I’ve never had another problem with my site being down, and switching to their hosting was free and easy.
My readers get a discounted rate with SiteGround (because I’m gladly an affiliate) in case you’ve had any trouble with your hosting service.
Okay….on with the next SEO trick.
#10. Make sure your site has an SSL certificate (in the URL you should see “https” instead of the old format “http”). This stuff gets a bit complicated, but over the years it’s become easier for hackers to gain access to payment information and other sensitive identity stuff.
HTTPS is a more secure, encrypted means of websites communicating important information to each other. It ensures safety to your customers and audience members, and makes Google very happy. Changing over to an SSL secure site is one of the easiest SEO optimizing tips to implement.
Page Linking SEO Tips and Google Analytics for SEO
#11. In all of your posts, your About page, Resources page, etc. — link to other relevant posts on your site. Aim for at least 2-3 links to other posts or areas of your site. Your About page is especially good for this.
It’s often the first page a reader sees, and you want them to stay on your site for a while. So direct them to some of your most popular content and keep them longer.
This can be as simple as: “Related Content:_____” or “More on this topic _____”, and link to that post. Page linking lets Google know that your topics are related to and relevant to each other. This is a great SEO practice.
#12. Connect your site to Google Analytics. This doesn’t directly affect your SEO, but it’s the best tool out there to evaluate if your SEO keyword tactics are working, where your traffic is coming from, what they’re interested in, how long they’re staying on your site…and the list goes on.
Having GA added to your site is invaluable information, and will help you perfect your SEO game over time. Here’s a YouTube video to show how it’s done.
Ain’t nobody got time for me to explain this one. It’s not hard, I promise. Yoast makes it so easy, you can almost do it with your eyes closed!
Class dismissed…almost
You’ve made it through all 12 SEO tips! I’m hoping these tasks won’t take much longer than 30 minutes to apply. Some things may already be done for you — some you may have already figured out.
Any time spent improving and learning about search engine optimization practices will bring you great rewards and traffic down the road.
I’m off to continue reading my 300+ page SEO “novel.”
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below. How was your first SEO lesson?
Need any help with your first month of blogging? I’ve created a special 31-Day Blogging Calendar for Beginners to get you started. Sign up below.
Please Pin and Share!
GREAT post! Fantastic suggestions, and easy to implement. I do have a question- if I change the Permalink format listed in Tip #1, will that apply only to posts going forwards? Or old posts as well? I don’t want to end up messing up my previously existing pins and the like. Thanks!
Thank you so much, and I’m glad you found it helpful! I’m very glad you asked this question…I went ahead and added a statement in red about this very thing. I may not have been clear enough that this tip is best done with brand new sites.
It can still be done, but don’t do anything until you read this guide: https://www.wpexplorer.com/change-permalinks-wordpress/
Or contact a tech support person you trust. Grayson Bell at iMark Interactive is wonderful and doesn’t charge an arm and a leg if you’d like help with this. Here’s his link: https://www.imarkinteractive.com/
I hope this helps!
Stephanie
Interesting read! I have been learning heaps about SEO recently and have a few thoughts. Making your site mobile responsive I agree is important not just for google but also for readers. Keywords in your domain name/ blog name/ tag line are not as much of a big deal. You just want to make sure you don’t have a generic domain name because it will be hard to rank for it. Choose a specific domain name so google will recognise your url as no 1 for that. Also from what I understand tags and categories are for your readers not for SEO and you actually don’t want to include them as part of your site map. I recently deleted all my tags and made my categories no-index. The reasoning is that tags/ categories generally have a low CTR and so take attention away from your key posts. 🙂
Hi Jane,
Thanks for the input and for stopping by!
Keywords in your blog’s tagline are very important (this doesn’t apply to a forced, unnaturally worded tagline). It not only tells your readers the main purpose of your blog, but also helps Google better determine what it’s about. You’re missing out on valuable SEO favor by not including some relevant keywords in your blog’s tagline.
If you use Pinterest for marketing your blog, this would be similar to not keywording your Pinterest profile for what your blog is about — a big mistake for SEO. We’ll agree to disagree.
As for domain name, for sure it isn’t wise to keyword stuff that, or choose something unnatural. But if a highly niched site that focuses say, on Paris, it may make sense to include “Paris” somewhere in the domain name if one hasn’t already been chosen. This isn’t totally necessary, but can be beneficial. Having a solid brand based on quality content is the winning factor in the SEO rankings for sure (well above domain name).
I didn’t mention site maps or including/excluding anything because there are more opinions on that than I can count.
However, keyworded and clear categories are very important for your site for the exact reason you stated, “categories are for your readers…” ANYTHING that helps your readers have a good experience on your site IS good for SEO.
Thank you so much, that helps me to have a good experience on my site, and good for SEO.
You’re very welcome, Hazem! I’m glad it’s helpful to you. 🙂