SEO For Dummies
I don’t know about you guys but when it comes to SEO and all things SEO I feel like kind of a dummy a lot of times. And as someone who barely knows anything when it comes to technology I really did not even know what SEO was till like some months ago. I’m not going to lie- SEO stuff makes me feel like a dummy. It took a lot of work for me to figure some of that stuff out. And I want to spare people the time and effort if I can. So, I decided to write this article for people like me who may be a bit technologically challenged. I know a lot of you do struggle with SEO stuff. Because I do get a lot of comments/emails/DM’s asking about it. So, here is SEO for Dummies!
These tips will most likely help you but if you feel like you are still not fully understanding how to make your posts and blog SEO friendly or if you just don’t have the time to make so many changes I wanted to let you know that I do offer SEO services now. I can personally both make your site as well as your blog posts more SEO friendly. For more on these services click here.
So basically, I have picked some basic stuff about SEO up over the last few months and noticed that certain small changes can make a huge difference so I decided to share these small ways through which you can improve your sites SEO. SEO for Dummies is for everyone and easy to follow. Hope this helps.
For Us Dummies, What Is SEO?
“SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.”- moz.com
I think this sums up SEO and what is really well so I’m going to just leave it at that.
Why Is SEO Important?
As mentioned above SEO can help you not only increase your traffic from search engines but also help you increase your traffic to a more specific audience. It helps you get an audience that is specifically looking for sites like yours. WordPress is awesome and I love connecting with other bloggers but just having WP traffic isn’t always enough especially if you are looking to blog professionally at some point. SEO gets you this outside traffic from search engines and helps you build your blog and diversifies the audience. Here are some easy and simple ways through which you can improve your SEO:
Theme
Your theme is absolutely a vital thing for your blog. The way your blog looks and loads is definitely directly related to how much traffic you get. Not even just SEO traffic but all traffic in general. Most people these days have shorter attention spans and if your blog does not load fast enough they are simply to going to move on to another blog that does load quickly.
Another thing you want to take into account when it comes to your theme is how easy it is to navigate. Can your reader easily find what they are looking for, do you have your categories neatly put somewhere so they can look at specific topics they are interested in and do you have a search button somewhere in case they are looking for a very specific post that they can’t seem to find. Also, is your font easy to read for everyone, does it load quickly, does it obstruct other text/links etc.
These are all such tiny things but they really make the biggest difference because often search engines will pick up on these little things and this will make you lose a lot of traffic that would have otherwise been directed to your site. I will be sharing a post which will be published at the same time as this one next week- Tuesday at 9 PM EST- and in that post I will talk in more detail about how to customise your theme to make it more SEO friendly and how to pick an SEO friendly theme to begin with. If this is something you are interested in check in again next week.
Headings
If you’re reading SEO for Dummies, I’m guessing you don’t know much about SEO. If you don’t know anything else about SEO, this is an easy win. Your headings are super important. And I will talk more about that below. But what’s even more important are your subheadings. Don’t stick with just using H1 headings. Use H2, H3 and H4 as well. Because this will help search engines pick up the topic of your post better. And therefore it will rank higher on the search engines pages. It’s a very simple but efficient way to increase your SEO. I also read that using an H2 heading with similar words or the same words as the H1 heading is also helpful because I guess it really emphasis what the topic of the post is and gets your keywords into the system.
Post length
Most sites agree that post length is very important when it comes to SEO. Although it’s not impossible for shorter posts to have a high SEO score it does help a lot if your posts are longer. I am not completely sure why (let me know in the comments below if you know why) but longer posts are definitely better for your SEO. Most people suggest that you write a post that contains about 1500-2000 words in it. And if you are able to write posts that are even longer then you should definitely go for it. Try to write posts that are longer than 2000 words.
The problem however with this is that it’s good for SEO but it may not always be good organic traffic. Yes, search engines will be able to pick it up more and you will likely see an increase in the amount of search engine traffic you get but at the same time you may lose your current/non-search engine following because they are used to your posts being a certain length and to be honest most people may not have the time/energy/enthusiasm/attention span to read really long 1500 plus word posts.
The advice I would give is write from the heart. If you can make it to 1500 words or more than that’s awesome. But if you can’t don’t force yourself. If you just keep rambling on people are going to realise that and kind of skip a lot of what you’ve written or stop reading your posts in general because most people don’t want to read someone rambling on just to fill the word count.
Another piece of advice I would give is that before you write a post do a lot of research about the topic you are writing on so that you aren’t just rambling but giving actual vital information to the reader about the topic while lengthening your posts. And at the end of the day if you can’t make it to a certain word count it’s really not the end of the world and it’s most definitely not worth losing your current audience over.
Images/gifs
Images and gifs are something that a lot of people forget about when it comes to their posts. There are so many benefits of using images and gifs on your posts such as it will draw in your readers, it will give your readers a break from reading if your post is longer, it will maintain your readers attention and in general it will just make your post more fun and interesting to read. Another awesome benefit is that images are great for your SEO. Images and gifs can really help draw in traffic from search engines and a lot of bloggers/sites admit that using images/gif’s really helps increase their traffic from search engines.
I do, however, want to warn people against using too many images in their posts. Yes, some images are good but overwhelming search engines with images will basically just get you listed as a spammer/spam. Also images do tend to slow down your loading time and as mentioned above loading time is very important when it comes to SEO. I would suggest stick to using a couple of images per post.
URL’s
URL’s are one thing that I think a lot of people neglect or that a lot of people may not know are super important when it comes to SEO. Make sure your URL isn’t too long or too short because this can effect your SEO as search engines may have a hard time identifying/categorizing your post. This isn’t really a URL thing in particular but I would also recommend double checking your title and making sure it is not too short or too long as this will effect your SEO and whether or not search engines are able pick up your post/article as well.
I will talk more about making SEO friendly titles in the next post if I decide to make another similar post. But until then try to keep your title medium length. Some suggest about 30 characters long and some suggest about 50. Also I have noticed some people use emojis, hashtags and other things in their title. This can directly affect your URL. So when you are editing your post make sure to edit your URL. Just to make sure that there are no emoji’s or useless hashtags in your URL.
Conclusion
I tried really hard to keep this post simple and to the point. Which I feel like a lot of posts about SEO aren’t. Because obviously a lot of technical terms and things are involved when it comes to SEO. However, this post is more for the average writer/blogger/site owner who may not always know much about SEO or technical terms. Basically I just didn’t want people to Google every five minutes before they understood what I was saying. So, I tried to keep it very basic. I know some people may find that beneficial. And if you enjoyed this kind of simple post about how to better your SEO I have a lot more simple tips like these that I can share with you. So let me know in the comments below if you would be interested in similar posts.
Thoughts On SEO For Dummies
What did you think of SEO for Dummies? What tips would you add for SEO for Dummies? Are you like me and have a hard time understanding SEO? What is something you have learnt about SEO that you have found beneficial? Did you know about the tips I mentioned above and do you use any of them? If so do you find them effective? Would you like to see more similar posts with easy/simple tips and tricks about SEO? As always I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. And if you don’t have any thoughts about SEO feel free to just say hi!
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