If designing a new blog and then writing tonnes of content and getting familiar with how to do everything else isn’t already hard enough, you then hear the term SEO!

Making your website or blog SEO-friendly is a whole new area and there is a lot involved and so I understand completely if you are feeling overwhelmed!

In this post though, I will give you 7 useful and easy-to-use tips on SEO for beginner bloggers. Even if you are not a beginner, you might also want to consider these 7 ideas.

1. You Need to Start Building Links

Now to understand why links are so important, let me explain why search engines place such a high value on links.

Put yourself in Google’s position, for example, and think about how you would decide where to place and position sites in search results.

Well, certainly one way would be by matching content on a website against a search term. So if someone does a web search for ‘lemon tea recipes’ and Google see that there is a webpage written about this very thing then, Google will begin to match up the search term with the page.

But what if hundreds of people in the world have written a page on ‘lemon tea recipes’? What then?

One KEY way for search engines to evaluate what sites matter is to look at what links that site has pointing at it.

If a lot of people link to Lemon Site A, then the search engines will consider that that site must be important and considered a useful resource.

The links to a site though, to be considered a good indicator of value, need, if possible, to come from trusted sites.

As you can see from the image above, if a site about ‘lemon tea’ was linked to from the BBC food site, on a fitness blog, and on a university health blog, Google will begin to think that the lemon tea site is of value.

You will need a lot more links than 10 but, if you build links gradually over time and raise your site’s DA value (domain authority value), then the SEO (search engine optimization) of your site is improving.

How To Get Started with Link Building

I have made a short video showing you how to build your first 10 links, and the video is directly below.

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Action to Take

Start link building by getting links on other people’s sites to your site. You might have to start with some easy to find links and, as I mention in the video above, start with profile links such as on a Facebook Business Page (if you use Facebook) or a link on any education sites you have a profile on. So build your first 10 links!

2. SEO Optimise Each Blog Post You Write

There are a number of things you will want to do on each and every blog post you write, to optimize the post for search engines.

Be warned though, first and foremost you want your posts to be written with your readers in mind, and not simply written for search engines.

Google has got very clever at understanding the content you write and, if you write high-quality content for the readers in your niche, you cannot go too far wrong.

It is worth installing the free plug-in Yoast SEO.

When you have this tool installed on WordPress, you enter the main term that your page is about and then the tool analyses your page.

The 5 key things you want to make sure you include in each post are:

• a couple of outbound links in your post (search engines value sharing)
• some internal links in the post to other pages on your site.
• a meta description and meta title.
• keywords in your URL (web page post address). So you see this page address ends in “seo-beginner-bloggers”
• High-quality content with the main keywords and also related terms, in the post. If you write naturally, using your knowledge, then you will probably naturally include these related terms.

The easiest way to know what to do is to use our FREE Blog Post SEO Checklist below.

Action to Take

Optimize each new blog post you write. Use the Blog Post SEO checklist above.

3. Remove Any Redundant Pages and Update Old Pages

If you read our last post on how to do an SEO Spring Clean, you will appreciate that you can make it real clear for search engines as to what your site is about, by keeping your site to one clear niche.

If your site is about cars and you have pages on your site about food recipes. Why?

If you are a lifestyle blogger and are intent on writing about a wide range of subjects then it is possible to succeed, just as Joanna Goddard has.

It is though much harder as a blogger trying to cover many topics.

Think about it. How do search engines decide what your site is really about? Can the likes of Google clearly and easily categorize your site under a specific niche and then match your site against searches for that niche?

Action to Take

Consider deleting any pages that are clearly not related to your site anymore. Then go to any pages that are out of date and give them a refresh. Update old information and add some new relevant text. Google loves sites that are kept up-to-date.

4. Try and Get Your Head around the Idea of User Intent and SEO

I do NOT want to make this post complex and confuse you even further about SEO. This post is largely aimed at you if you are a relative beginner to SEO.

Understanding what User Intent for SEO is though, is a fantastic way to make sure that you are actually writing content that people actually want to read. It can save you a lot of otherwise wasted time!

If you have not read our post on SEO and user intent, do not worry 🙂 as I have made a video for you to watch. Just grab a cup of coffee or tea and watch this video.

Action to Take

Before you start writing any post, spend just 5 minutes doing a search of the main term that your new post will be about. As you search, evaluate (using what you learn in the video above) what the user intent is and use this information to build your next new blog post.

5. Site Speed to Improve SEO

Google and other search engines place more value on sites that are fast and efficient. So much so that Google makes available its own Site Speed tool for you to use for free.

Another great tool and one that a lot of webmasters use and that is also FREE is from GTMetrik.

To get started, just enter your website address into the box on the GTMetrik homepage and then click ‘Analyze’.

Give it about 30 seconds and then GTMetrix will give you a Page Speed Score and a YSlow Score.

If you scroll down the GTMetrix results page, you will then see a breakdown of the recommendations for Pagespeed (you can also later click the tabs for YSlow and other tabs).

What you need to do now is to click on one of the recommendation headings. So I am going to click the recommendation titled “Optimize images”.

In my case, if I click ‘Optimize images’, the first recommendation I got for this site is “Losslessly compressing  https://www.promarketingonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/prom-logo.png could save 6.6KiB (64% reduction)”.

Any recommendations to optimize images is quite easy to fix as you can take any image and use the FREE Image Compressor tool to reduce the image size.

Another option to optimize your images on your site is to use the plugin Smush Image compression.

Action to Take

Check your site speed on GTMetrix and fix anything that you really are able to. Certainly do fix any images that can easily be optimized.

6. Develop Social Engagement and Social Proof

You will see that, at the bottom of this page, we invite you to “Add Your Comment” so that you have a chance to ask questions and give feedback (and you can add a link to your site too).

As the website owner, it means that you are showing social engagement directly on your site if you receive and answer comments. This is even better than social media engagement because comments show search engine’s direct interaction on your site.

It is also worth using one or two social media sites. Why not create a Facebook Business Page (free) or a Pinterest Business account (free). Every time you do a blog post, why not then Pin it as we do on our Pinterest page and on our Facebook Page. Take a look!

Action to Take

So, before you think about social media, first turn on your comments section on your site. Do also though make sure you install the Akismet plugin so that any spam comments are filtered out.

Consider also creating a couple of social media accounts and use them to post your new content, every time you make a new blog post.

7. Optimize Your Images for SEO

There are several ways in which you can optimize images on each page of your site. So let me go through the main ways.

a) Optimize the Image File Size

As discussed above in point 5 when we talked about site speed, you will remember I have suggested two tools.

• Image Compressor (site)
• Smush image compressor (plugin)

With either of those tools, you can reduce the file size (in terms of kb) so that your images will load much faster on your site. Definitely do this first.

b) Name Your Images Using keywords

When naming your images, make sure to use the keywords that relate to that page, in any images on the page.

I wrote about how to name images in the recent post on how to use keywords when writing a new post so I will not go into detail here.

Just think though in terms of making images clear by using good image names so, instead of naming something untitled2.jpg, you might want to call it seo-keywords.jpg, if the image were an example of using keywords for SEO.