Do you have a blog? Do this to improve your SEO positioning
The best way to position a blog is to generate articles or notes with original, relevant and current content for your target audience. For these circumstances, we recommend following SEO actions focused on content, however, there are technical actions to consider.
But first of all, let's remember the basics:
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This method is free, meaning you don't have to pay to get a position in the ranking and it is long-term. It is done through optimization techniques that are applied to a web page so that it is visible in search engines and users can find the website.
SEO is essential to achieve:
- Quality organic traffic to our blog
- Visibility and diffusion in search engines
- Improve page positioning through generated user queries
- User interaction with content to generate conversions (leads)
- Brand Presence
The elements to focus on for blog positioning originate from the theme, that is, what topic we are going to write about:
Choosing a theme based on keywords that are trending or relevant to the brand's industry or segment is essential.
TIP: A tool that can guide you in knowing what to write about is Google Trends , this free tool comes from the Google search engine and helps us identify topics or words related to the blog's market niche.
*We recommend adding an image/video as a visual break from the text.
Elements involved in SEO positioning
After the topic, we must focus on more technical elements to evaluate the blog's SEO positioning, these elements are listed below:
- Web architecture
- Metadata
- Content
- Images and/or Videos
- Internal Links
- Site speed
Each one has its own elements that represent a link to guarantee an ideal positioning, where if we carry it out properly as a whole it will represent an increase in organic metrics. Below, we will briefly review each element, emphasizing a content-oriented element:
Web architecture
It represents how our blog is structured, organized and distributed. It specifically influences:
- Directories: Categories and subcategories
- Friendly URLs
- Canonical
- Internal links
One of the elements that is related to the content is the “URL”. To make a Friendly URL we need:
- relevant keywords. To know which keywords to use, we suggest you think about how you would search for your own content on the Internet?
- Lowercase
- Hyphens to separate keywords. *This is because if you use underscores the search engine robot interprets the keywords as one.
- An extension that is between 90 and 115 characters long.
Avoid:
- Keyword stuffing: Repeating the same word several times
- Stop Keywords: empty words or words that do not have a search level such as prepositions, articles, etc.
- Capital letters
- Special characters and accents
- Spaces
- Repeated routes
- Diagonals
Metadata
Metadata gives us visibility in the results pages for user queries. It is the most important part of how to attract the user to the website, that is, the first impression they have of the site, where they decide whether to click. To do this, you need to get their attention:
Therefore, we will focus on two elements mainly:
- Title link
- Description
Title Link
The Title link is the title of a search result that links to a web page.
It involves elements such as:
- Meta title.
- h1 header.
To optimize the meta title we recommend:
- Length: 55 to 60 characters .
- Include keywords.
- Add the name of the site or brand.
With the above we can guarantee better performance for the meta title, so we will provide an example:
Optimized Title: Optimize your blog to improve your SEO positioning | MHA Consulting
- Length: 59 characters .
- Keywords: SEO positioning
- Site name: MHA Consulting
*We will see the optimization of the h1 header later in the headers section.
Description
The meta description is a brief description of the content of the page. In some cases it can be used as a rich snippet (a rich snippet is a special field with more attractive elements and a privileged position displayed in the SERPs).
The elements to be evaluated are:
- Length: 156 to 160 characters equals approximately 32 words.
- Value Attribute: some data or word that differentiates them from the competition in SERPs.
With the above we can guarantee better performance for the meta description, so we will provide an example:
Optimized Description: Learn how to optimize your blog with SEO elements with this practical guide. We also provide you with tips and tools that will help you do it.
- Extension: 151
- Main keyword at the beginning of the meta description: how to optimize your blog with SEO elements
- Keywords by semantic or long tail: SEO, guide, tips, tools.
- Value Attribute: Tips with tools.
TIP: To view the metadata as it would appear in the search engine, we recommend using Higher Visibility , which helps you measure the URL, title, and description length in pixels.
Content
As we mentioned at the beginning, content is king when it comes to blog optimization. Extensive content that clarifies and answers all of the user's questions regarding the topic is an instant plus for the search engine robot and therefore for the interest of the Internet user.
To create quality content we recommend following these steps:
General Information
- Length: 300 words or more depending on the topic and complexity of the content.
- Headings: Remember that headings serve as a hierarchy for the content and indicate to the search engine robot the length of the note.
-They must be less than 70 characters long and have a structure similar to the following:
- <H1>Title of the note or article</H1>
-There is only one h1
-It is the main theme
- <H2>Subtitle</H2>
- <H3>Structure of the note to highlight</H3>
Content style
- Bold: Main and semantic keywords highlighted once.
- Italics: Neologisms, anglicisms, etc.
- “Underlined”: Quotations or book titles with quotation marks.
First paragraph
- Main keyword at the beginning of the paragraph.
- Meaning of Information according to the inverted pyramid. From greatest to least relevance.
- Answers questions: who?, what?, when?, why? and how? - Basic idea of the content.
Second Paragraph onwards
- Keywords by semantics from the 2nd paragraph onwards, synonyms of the main keywords can be used.
- Second paragraph: Development of the first paragraph, provides details and expands on aspects.
- Third Paragraph onwards: Data is provided in decreasing order of importance.
- Last Paragraph: End with a secondary idea.
TIP: When creating content on a specific topic, we recommend avoiding:
- Self-generated content (which does not make sense to the reader, but contains keywords, texts translated without manual review, copy paste from one or more sites)
- Content without value
- Cloaking - Content hidden from users but visible to the bot.
*We recommend adding an image/video as a visual break from the text.
Images and/or Videos
Adding multimedia, in this case images or videos, encourages user interaction, causing them to stay longer on the page.
For this, the images and videos must meet certain standards, in this case they are:
- File name: Same optimization as URL.
- Weight: Image weight less than 100 KB, in video it is recommended that it be an embed to avoid slowing down the site.
- Title, description and/or legend: It is recommended to use keywords related to the image in relation to the content where it is being placed.
ALT attribute
There is an element focused on images known as the alt attribute. The alt attribute improves accessibility for people with visual disabilities, and if the image is broken within the content, the image description appears as text.
For the alt attribute, it is recommended to use keywords that describe the image, as long as its length does not exceed 100 characters.
Internal Links
Internal links have a primary function, which is to help the search engine robot find more pages related to the content within the website to add them to its index.
If a page does not have internal links, it is known as an orphan page and therefore the search engine robot ignores its presence, so it is not added to the search engine index.
It is recommended that one link be added for every three paragraphs of content.
Said link must:
- Be active, that is, with a 2xx status, which means that it is available and in good communication with the site server.
- The anchor text must be consistent with the content of the link.
- The link must contain DOFOLLOW, the reason is to transmit its authority around the pages of the site.
It is recommended not to hide links to manipulate ranking classification.
Site speed
Site speed is a huge ranking factor, having a slow site results in a poor user experience. Users are looking for immediate content that satisfies their need at that moment.
Therefore, the site needs to improve its speed for an optimal experience. We recommend performance tools that help provide guidance on critical elements that affect your performance.
It is a free tool from the Google search engine that includes data from the Chrome User Experience (CrUX) report to show information on the actual performance of the pages.
It is based on loads:
- Good: Most performance best practices are applied on this page. It has a score of 80 or higher.
- Average: This page is missing several common performance optimizations. It has a score between 60 and 79.
- Low: This page is not optimized. It has a score between 0 and 59.
GTMETRIX:
It is a demo tool that performs detailed website analysis, allowing us to fully understand the blog loading process. It indicates the download time of each element involved in the site such as CSS, JS, HTML, etc., allowing detailed optimizations to be performed so that the user has the best possible experience with respect to speed.
This tool is for expert levels, as it is a performance testing website in this case for blogs, intended primarily for developers. Just to set it up it consists of a large number of test locations to choose from, and in the default location, also a large variety of devices to use.
As you will see, optimizing a blog with SEO strategies goes beyond the content, however, we have no doubt that with these recommendations your site will improve considerably.
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