The Simple SEO Checklist for your Blog Pages
There are several simple things you can do to improve the SEO-ness of the blog pages & article pages on your website.
Much of the technicality that powers this is built in to eCommerce systems, but sometime you have to request it from your site builders.
Whether it’s already in place on your site or not – you need to understand it in order to use it in order for it to make a difference for your business.
That’s why we’ve put together this simple seo checklist for you. (also see our other checklist all about product pages)
Why are these Simple SEO tweaks important for your Blogs?
If someone is on a search engine, searching on topics related to your business and the products you sell – you want them to find you.
These simple tweaks will make that much more likely, because they’ll make it easy for Google to realise what your blog and article pages are all about.
Simple as that!
The Simple SEO Checklist for your Blog Pages
A quick word on Tags – I’m going to mention them a lot. It’s short hand for the html code used to mark something on your page out as something special.
For example here you can see the H1 tag which marks out the words “2016 is our year of The Customer” as being special.
1 – The H1 Tag
The H1 tag signifies what the most important text is on the page. That should also be the text which best explains what’s on the page. And therefore there should only be one of them.
On this page the title of the blog post is the H1 tag – so it’s “The Simple SEO Checklist for your Blog Pages”
Usually on a blog or article page – it’s the name of the blog or article!
So check:
- Your Blog / Article titles are automatically being set as H1s
- Make sure there is only one H1 tag on each page
- You are writing blog / article page titles that explain the content of the page, in an interesting way – so “FAQ” is bad, “FAQ about mugs” is good
2 – The Other H Tags
The H tags are not limited to the number 1. You can have lots of H tags – H2, H3, H4 and so on, the higher the number the less important they show their content to be. Unlike the H1 tags you can have multiple of each of these. Your second most important headings on the page should be H2, third most important headings H3, and so on.
On this page the sub headings (eg “Why are these Simple SEO tweaks important for your Blogs?”) are set to H2; and the checklist headings (eg “The H1 tag”) are set to H3.
To make these H tags super-powerful you should include keywords from the H1 in them. – you can see how I’ve done that with my H2s.
Sometimes on short pages there isn’t anything you can set as H2,H3s etc – and that is fine. But most blogs / articles will benefit from sub headings because people like to scan – so you’ll probably have some of these to set up.
So check:
- Are there sub headings on your pages you want set as other H tags?
- Get those set up
3 – Your Images
With a few tweaks you can explain your images much more clearly to the search engines, which means they’ll be much more likely to appear in search results. This will also help the search engine understand the whole page better – so it’s not just about the image search results.
You should make sure your images have an Alt Tag, a Title, and a file name that match.
As you can see with the main image on this page all those 3 are set to “The Simple SEO Checklist for your Blog Pages” – the same name as the blog post itself and the H1 tag.
So you should set yours to describe the content of the image, and where possible include the keywords for the page.
So check:
- How your images are currently set up
- Get them set up correctly
4 – Keyword Usage
Whilst the days of keyword stuffing are long dead, you do need to be focusing each page of your website on a keyword or keyphrase.
One you know what the keyword/keyphase is it should be used throughout the page (where it makes sense to put it). Adding it to the H1, and the Images and the other Hs will have helped.
We also need to include the keywords in the copy on the page, and include similie phrases – so for this page I should also be typing about “easy seo tips” for example!
So check:
- You’ve mentioned the keyword / keyphrase in any copy on the page
- (Where you can) you’ve mentioned similies of the keyword / key phrase
5 – Meta Data (Simple Meta Data)
Meta Data is the general term for the all the things can be wrapped up in those tags I mentioned at the start of the post.
There are another 2 (as well as the ones for the images) that can’t been seen by the visitor to your website (well not really be seen), and which we want to get right.
The Title tag is the tag that explains the title of your page (you thought that was theH1? well , almost but no). The only place you can see on your website without going to the code is in the title bar of the browser:
The other place it appears is in the search results – a lot of the time (not all of the time) the search engines will use your title tag as the big blue/purple link in your listing on the search engines:
So the title tag is really important to help the search engine know what your page is about AND encourage a person to click to your website. Therefore we want it to start with the title of the blog or article, then include your brand name at the end.
The Meta Description tag is the tag which describes what your page is about. On your website no one can see it, but it’s usually the grey text that peters out on the search results.
Usually on a page you’ll use the first couple of paragraphs of the article or blog for it.
So check:
- Your title tags are set to auto fill with “{page title} – {your brand name}”
- Your meta descriptions are set to auto fill with “{start of article / blog}”
That’s it for our simple SEO checklist for your blog and article pages.
This was written as part of our 2016 Campaign – It’s all about the Customer