How To Improve Your Blog’s Search Rankings

In times past, improving your page ranking in a search engine like Google was a simple matter of just throwing in more keywords. Fast forward to today and things have changed a lot. Many of the old strategies will now penalise you and the particulars of how page rankings are calculated are closely guarded proprietary secrets. Now there’s an emphasis on relevance, quality, and socially connected content so it’s important to focus on these strategies.

1. Keywords

You’ll probably already have a good understanding of what keywords are relevant to your content, but have you looked into how you can boost results using long and short tail keywords? These are groupings of keywords into phrases. For example, a short tailed keyword phrase would be “office stationery supplies” and it will generate a lot of hits because it is very broad search term. A longer tailed version of it would be “cheap office stationery supplies in Sydney”. It’ll generate less results, but they’ll be more targeted. With a little experimentation you’ll find the right phrase length to optimise your ranking.

2. Metadata

While we are on the subject of keywords, let’ also make use of them in metadata – data about data. Metadata helps search engines determine the quality and relevance of your work more easily. Here are some ways to add metadata to your blog posts:
Begin by constructing suitable page titles based on the most actively searched keywords. If your content management system allows it, also enter a brief sentence for the page description. Make use of the “alt” attribute for images too because these also play a role in determining quality and relevance.

3. Social Networking

Search engines pay a lot of attention to what is trending on social networks. Include sharing buttons in your post for services like Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus. You should also share links with your followers and friends from within your own social media accounts.

4. Mobile Versions

One of the most phenomenal areas of growth in recent years has been the explosion of mobile devices. These days everyone has a smartphone or tablet and many people now consume all of their online content solely from these devices. Pages that are slow to load are penalised so if your posts aren’t mobile-friendly you are going to lose traffic. This doesn’t mean you have to serve multiple versions of your content. Just ensure that images are suitably optimised and that visitors can navigate around the page easily from their smaller screen.

5. Monitoring

If you are really serious about increasing your presence online you’ll need to become familiar with webmaster tools. They’ll allow you to monitor the traffic as it relates to your site by generating useful statistics and reports. You can use the ideas above to experiment with small tweaks. The statistics and reports offered by these management tools will help you determine which changes generate the best results for your content.

• https://www.google.com/webmasters
• https://www.bing.com/webmaster/

The suggestions above should get you started on the right track. As you develop your content it is really important to keep asking yourself a simple question: am I contributing content that people want? If your content is good quality and well-written people will want to share it

Luke Chaffey is a Digital Marketing Specialist with KBB Digital. For advice on Digital Marketing, including SEO Services and Digital Strategy, visit KBB Digital.