Blog Marketing 101: What is SEO And How to Improve Your On-Page SEO Part 1

Hello again! For those who didn’t catch my last post on how to make Rich Pins I am Jackie’s younger brother, Sean, and I help her out whenever I get the chance with marketing and monetizing her blog. I figured I would offer some weekly (I’m a little late sometimes) marketing and monetizing tips for anyone who is looking for some help. This week I wanted to cover two topics: What is SEO and how to improve you’r on-page SEO.

You might be asking yourself what in the heck is SEO and what does it have to do with my website. Well to begin with, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and the name should pretty much give it away, but it basically means optimizing your website so you can become more visible on search engines such as Google and Bing. SEO is heavily important for any website even if you expect most of your traffic to come from social sites like Pinterest.

Just imagine if you happened to have a post on your blog like “Top 10 blah” and for this example the keyword “Top blah” gets at least 10,000 searches a month on Google. If someone searches this and your post shows up as a search result, but it is all the way on page 10 of the search results your going to most likely get 0 hits from search engines. Now if your post showed up as the 1st or even 3rd search result for the keyword “Top blah” (and it is still getting around 10,000 searches a month) you can expect a huge amount of traffic from search engines.

I could go on and on about SEO and it’s advantages along with everything you could do to help improve your blog’s SEO, but today I’m just going to cover some basic tips on how to improve your blog’s On-Page SEO. Also encase you weren’t sure, On-Page SEO means improving your website’s pages and posts for better visibility on search engines. Anyhoo here are those On-Page SEO tips I promised!

On-Page SEO Tips

1. Search Engine Friendly Permalink URLs

Search Engines love when you use optimized URLs for your post so it is best to include your post’s title (with keywords in it) in your URLs. For example look at the  2 URLs given below.

 https://www.iheartartsncrafts.com/?p=123

and

https://www.iheartartsncrafts.com/2014/05/25/sample-post/

These URLs are horrible compared to this URL given below.

Top 10 Educational Apps for Toddlers

This URL is perfect, not only because its a lot better looking than the other 2 URLs given, but also because it contains keywords that someone might be searching for right in the URL. Also I would like to mention that having too many sub-directories in the URL can have a negative effect on SEO (see the second URL example I gave), the sweet number for SEO would be to have about 2-3 sub-directories, anything after that might have a negative impact on that specific page’s rank in a Search Engine.

2. Awesome SEO-Friendly Title

This tip is extremely important and something you should do with every post or at least most of your posts. The title of your post should definitely include some specific keywords that relate to your post. For example the title given for one of my sister’s previous posts was titled “Top 10 Educational Apps For Toddlers“, this title includes both keywords and a keyword phrase which will help that page rank better anytime someone is trying to find “Top Educational Apps For Toddlers” or something similar. Now if she would of titled the post something like “Apps My Kids Love” that would be nowhere near as good as the original title. Also try to make sure you’r titles are kept under 60-70 characters.

3. Meta-Descriptions

For those who don’t know what Meta-Descriptions are, they are those little 1-2 sentence summaries shown for a post or page on a search result. Optimized Meta-Descriptions are highly important, they should make sense, give a 1-2 sentence summary of what your post is about, include keywords or at least a keyword phrase related to that specific post or page, and lastly try to keep the Meta-Description under 160 characters. If you want to check out how your Meta-Descriptions are showing on search engines, just go to google.com and in the search bar type in the text given below (replace “yoursite.com” with your website’s URL).

site: yoursite.com

Doing this will show all of your posts and pages that Google has indexed and will help you make sure your Meta-Description (along with your title) is showing up the way you want it for all the pages and posts indexed by Google.

4. Media Galore!

Fill those boring old dull posts with some attractive images or videos. Throwing some media in your posts will not only help make your post’s more attractive, but they can help keep your readers on your site longer which is something Search Engines like Google take into account when ranking your website.

Don’t forget to subscribe to us so you know when I post the second part to this post with the rest of the tips. Also I wanted to mention for anyone curious about how I research keywords I will be making a post sometime soon where I will give a little tutorial on how to find and research good keywords for your blog posts.