Simple Ways to Improve Your Blog Posts' SEO

In digital marketing, SEO is still top of mind. Google is forever making changes and updates to refine its algorithm, and people are in turn forever worrying if their content is going to be affected.

For the foreseeable future, Google remains the king of search despite all the recent competition from Bing with CoPilot AI, ChatGPT, and AI search-based startups like Perplexity. The majority of the globe still defaults to Google to find what they want.

Without getting too deep into the technicalities, algorithmic changes, and on-site vs. off-site strategies, SEO really is about good content, formatted well, and focused on the reader. My SEO peers will nod at me but also give me an eye roll for being overly simplistic, but not everyone has the time, resources, or money to do all of the things in an SEO audit.

SEO really is about good content, formatted well, and focused on the reader.

In this article, I want to keep it simple and back to basics. Improving the SEO of your blog posts can seem daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. With a few simple tweaks, you can boost your search engine rankings and reach a wider audience. Here’s how you can do it.

Refining the Post URL

The URL, or slug, of your blog post is one of the first things search engines crawl. A concise, keyword-rich URL can significantly improve your SEO.

For example, instead of a lengthy URL like:
www.yourblog.com/how-to-improve-your-seo-with-these-simple-tips

Go for something shorter and more direct like:
www.yourblog.com/improve-seo-tips.

This minor change makes your URL shorter, to the point, and humanly memorable even though we don’t often type out URLs anymore. It includes the base message of the article title.

Optimizing Metadata

Metadata is text included early in your site’s HTML code that a search engine interacts with first before the rest of the page. This text is what is displayed in a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) to show you a preview.

It’s important to optimize these because it’s the teaser to your content that someone searching will see, and it needs to connect with and entice the searcher to click on the search result and read your content.

Title Tag

Most people will leave the title tag the same as the article title. But sometimes you have an editorialized and clever article title that, in the context of reading the article, makes sense. However, for someone scanning a list of links in a SERP, it doesn’t really tell them why they should click to read more.

For instance: “Simple Ways to Improve Your Blog Posts’ SEO”
is more effective than “Blog Post SEO Tips.“

Keep them under 60 characters to ensure they display properly in SERPs.
Include the primary keyword near the beginning.
Make them descriptive and compelling to attract clicks.
Avoid keyword stuffing and ensure they read naturally.

Meta Description

While title tags are variations of the article title that are more direct, the meta description expands on it with the aim of distilling the value of the content to the reader.

For example: “Discover easy SEO tips to boost your blog’s visibility and reach a wider audience. Read more now!“

A well-crafted meta description encourages clicks and should be under 160 characters, including your primary keyword and a call to action.

Keep them under 160 characters.
Include the primary keyword and make the description relevant to the content.
Write in an engaging manner, encouraging users to click.
Use a call to action when appropriate to prompt users to take the next step.

Strategic Linking

The web is a web of links all connecting pages and sites together. Search engines like to “crawl” sites, discovering new content and making connections between pieces of information. Simplistically, that’s how it creates relevance and relations and understands content.

Interlinking

Interlinking connects your own content to other pages and articles on your website. It helps search engines browse around your site, understanding your site’s structure. From a reader’s point of view, it gives them ways to move around your site, finding related content to hang around longer. And you want people to stick around on your site.

External Linking

External links are links to content outside of your website. If you’re writing an article and have content you’ve sourced from a reputable website, it’s best practice to link out and cite that source. For one, it gives you credibility with your audience via transparency, and from an SEO perspective, it shows search engines that your content is well-researched.

Optimizing Images

In my experience, this has to be the most overlooked step in optimizing your content for SEO, and I’m guilty of skipping this step. People are visual, and we can absorb so much more information from images at a glance than from reading. We love to put images in our content, but more often than not, forget to optimize them.

File Names

Image filenames are important for the web because it takes that awful generic filename and gives it context. If you took a picture on your phone or camera, it will have a serialized number like DSC_1234.jpg, and that means nothing to anyone, especially search engines.

By renaming your image filename to something descriptive of the content in it or its relation to the content it’s in, it adds more value. If someone wants to download the image, they can find it easier in their downloads folder. And if you are searching for an image, it’s easier for search engines to display your image because it understands a little more about it.

Before uploading, rename image files with relevant keywords. Instead of IMG1234.jpg, use something like seo-tips-analysis.jpg.

Alt Tags

Alt tags are a text description of the image that is usually included in the HTML of an image on a website. Search engines use it to understand the context of the image in relation to the page or article content.

More importantly, it’s used by screen readers for the visually impaired to describe the image to someone who has difficulty seeing. Alt tags should briefly describe the image content and can enhance the user experience for a diverse audience, helping with accessibility compliance.

For example, an image of a blog post might have an alt tag like “Person analyzing SEO data on a computer screen.”

Compressing Images

The heaviest elements on your site are generally multimedia, and images are the most widely used media. If you don’t optimize images by resizing them appropriately or compressing them, they will display in your article in their original size.

Luckily, most CMSs like WordPress will resize an image for the placement and context it’s in automatically. But in most cases, you want to compress it so it’s not a huge file size in megabytes.

A great tool to compress images for the best possible web-optimized file size without sacrificing quality is TinyPNG. It’s free for limited use, and for an insanely low fee, you can install a WordPress plugin, and have it do the heavy lifting behind the scenes automatically.

Final Thoughts

There is obviously so much more to SEO than what is discussed here, but in my experience, these tend to be the things that most people overlook when creating content, or over time, let slip. Keeping these fundamentals top of mind in your content creation, you can cover the basics and then focus on the bigger picture content strategy.

Simple Ways to Improve Your Blog Posts’ SEO

Refining the Post URL

Optimizing Metadata

Title Tag

Meta Description

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Strategic Linking

Interlinking

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File Names

Alt Tags

Compressing Images

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