In order to have a successful blog, and increase the visibility of your website, you need to be seen online, which is not possible without successful search engine optimization. One very specific area of SEO that we are going to talk about today is the onsite optimization of your blog content.
Let’s find out what onsite SEO is, how to start it, and what activities does it include. Without any further due, let’s start!
Onsite Optimization – What Is It?
One of the most important parts of every search engine optimization is the onsite optimization. It allows Google and other search engines to rank different keywords on the website and give you the overall ranking in the search results.
Basically, it is everything you do to explain to search engines what the post on the page is all about, and for what keywords it should be ranked. So, in other words, when someone types a specific word or phrase, your post should appear in the search results.
This is by far no easy task, which is why a lot of website owners and companies tend to hire special agencies, whose job is to do partial or complete SEO optimization.
How to Start Doing Onsite Optimization
There are 7 simple steps that should help you to start doing onsite optimization. Let’s see what they are and talk about each of them individually. And it is extremely import to work with a solid hosting company to assure your blog is up and running. Hosting Foundry’s comparisons are great.
Step 1: Set Up Google Analytics
One of the best SEO tools everyone should use is, of course, Google Analytics. It is used to closely monitor everything you do in regards to the SEO, including collecting traffic data.
This allows you to get a better picture of your results, and check if specific strategies worked, or if you need to make some changes.
Step 2: Use Google Search Console
Next to that, there is also a Google Search Console, which tells you how exactly search engines see and treat your website. This includes data such as the number of searches and pages that are shown in the search results.
Step 3: Add Yoast SEO
One very useful tool to use when it comes to SEO is Yoast SEO. It allows you to check the SEO and Readability score of your website.
If everything is fine, you will see the green light. If you should make some improvements, you will see a red or yellow light.
Apart from just telling you if there are problems, Yoast SEO shows the exact problems to you, such as too many sentences written in the passive voice, or too few internal or external links, problems with the titles, etc.
Step 4: Make an XML Sitemap
When it comes to creating an XML sitemap, it’s quite important for the search engines because it tells them what pages you would like them to index.
To simplify, it is a list of all pages that are accessible by website visitors and users. In general, XML sitemaps don’t affect your rank in the search engines, but they are extremely important when it comes to SEO because they make sure every page on your website is indexed as it should.
Step 5: Use Rich Snippets
A snippet is a short introductory text that is shown in search results when you type something in the search box. The best way to optimize it to be shown is to include a key phrase of your blog post in it.
If you’re lazy to write your own snippets, you can get some advice on Schema.org, where you can get a rich snippets plugin for WordPress.
Step 6: Use Alt Text on Images
One thing you might not know is that search engines also rank posts for images as well. When you search by using a specific image, you will get a list of websites that are using the same or similar image.
Also, when you type a keyword in the image search, you will also get a list of images that are ranked according to that keyword.
Therefore, it is always a good idea to use alt text for images you put on the website. For that purpose, you should use the keyword from the subheading where the image is, or some keyword related to the topic of that subheading.
Step 7: Internal Linking
Last, but not least, it’s important to put some internal links in your post. You can do that by either putting it on a specific keyword or use custom HTML codes to create a separate box for the link to be put in.
Either way, the link will be in the post, allowing people to swap to your other posts, which is also related to the topic, which increases the website traffic.
Conclusion
Today, we talked about the most important ways to search engine optimize your blog content before publishing it on your website. This should allow you to do better SEO, and get more potential clients and customers.
About The Author
Stella is an illustrator, a lifestyle and fashion blogger, and a travel enthusiast. She is very passionate about the environment and she loves giving tips about healthy lifestyles and self-development. Stella is a lover of basics and her style can be described as urban luxe. She is a contributor to several lifestyles and fashion blogs and magazines.
Read more from Stella Green Thompson on Twitter.