SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s basically how you make sure that people find your website when they search online. If you have a blog, then why not do some SEO best practices to rank your pages?

Blogging is a great way to share your knowledge and experience with others. You can blog about anything ranging from personal experiences to business ideas. There are many platforms where you can start blogging including WordPress, Tumblr, Blogspot, and Medium. When you are talking about blogging, you can’t ignore SEO. Blogging is nothing without SEO.

Here are some SEO Best practices to optimize your site

1. Use of target keywords

There are places where you should use keywords apart from the main content. But you should not overdo it. My suggestion would be to use it in the heading, main content twice or thrice, and in conclusion, apart from that, use them in the following places too.

We should use keywords in the title tags of the post. In simple words, the keywords should be in the post title. Not only there but also in the post title and its URL. Doing so will increase your Search appearances in Google search queries.

2. Image optimization

Do you compress your images before using them in the blog? Do you know compressed images load faster and increase the overall speed of your website? That’s not all, you also need to mention the keywords in the alt tags of the images to optimize them.

When you do this, Google will easily understand your content. These will then rank your pages in their top search results. You can use Plugins like smush for compressing images

3. Optimize the speed of your pages

No one likes slow internet, and similarly no one like a slow website. Do you know Google doesn’t rank websites that are slow and whose pages don’t load properly or take a longer time to load? Therefore, you need to make your website run fast, or else no one will read your blog.

For that, there are a couple of things that are done to improve the speed of your website like using an optimized theme, using a cache plugin, compressing your images, use a CDN. This will improve the speed of your website.

4. Target Specific keywords

Do you do keyword research before writing your content? You know why it is done. If no one is searching for your content, there is no point in writing it. Write on things that people are searching for and there is nothing much available on the internet.

You can use tools like Ahrefs for doing keyword research. This tool can even know the search volumes, estimated traffic, and competition for those keywords. Write content on keywords that have low competition but a reasonable search volume. This way, you can easily rank your pages for those keywords.

5. Use a short URL

Search engines don’t like long URLs, because it makes it challenging for Google to understand your content. If search engines can’t read your content, they won’t show it either in their results. Therefore, avoid using long URLs for your post. Even if your title is long.

If your title is long, try to make it short but don’t change its meaning nor exclude the keywords. There are different ways to show the same thing. You need to use your brain a little more.

Conclusion

When you are talking about blogging, you can’t ignore SEO. Blogging is nothing without it. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s basically how you make sure that people find your website when they search online. Therefore, you should follow these SEO practices.