5 Easy Ways to Improve the SEO of a blog & Boost Traffic

5 easy ways to improve the SEO of a blog

A blogger needs to know at least the basics of SEO. For this, you don't need to be an SEO expert but you need to know the minimum so that your posts are well indexed in the search engines.

The phrase "Content is King" is one of the widest spread Internet memes being used by so many bloggers with the idea that you should focus on having quality content, while the rest isn't that important. This is not true. Quality content is essential, but bloggers shouldn't focus only on this matter. Besides producing quality content, your text needs to be optimized for the search engines.

Boost traffic & increase SERP visibility with SEO

5 Easy Ways to Improve the SEO of a Blog

Now, let's get to know the basics that any blogger needs to learn about SEO, as well as other simple SEO techniques. Below are 5 easy tips to improve the SEO of your blog:

1. Define the keyword

When you write a post, it is recommended to choose the right SEO keyword for your text. Your purpose is to make this keyword - or term - to be searched on Google, and then get your post among the top. For this, you need to use this keyword a few times in the text.

For example, here the keyword could be SEO, but this term is too common and I could hardly get in the top for this search. Then, I'll work with a phrase or a long tail keyword, so that this post will rank for the term "easy ways to improve the SEO of a blog". I will use this keyword a few times, but without overdoing it.

2. Use the keyword in the post title

Now that I have defined the keyword, I will use it in the post title. This step is very important, and certainly will help you to get a better SEO rank. For instance, the post title contains the easy ways to improve the SEO of a blog keyword, along with other words to form an attractive and optimized title for SEO.

3. Use the keyword in H2 tags

You must also use heading tags (h2, h3) in your posts. Here, we added the "easy ways to improve the SEO of a blog" keyword in a H2 heading. Do this always as it will help you rank well in the search results. If you don't know or don't understand what are the heading tags, I would suggest to do a further research on this topic.

4. Use the keyword in the text

Include the chosen keywords throughout the text. Especially in the first paragraph (please note that I have repeated the title in italics in the first sentence). But be careful when doing this, there is a maximum and minimum limit for that. A good keyword density is between 1.5% to 4.5% for best results. Less than that will have no effect and more can alert the search engines and your text might be considered spam.

5. Publish Posts with 300 words or more

Posts under 300 words have little chance to be among the top results in search engines. Of course, you will be able to rank for multiple keywords that are less popular with less than 300 words, but for the most competitive keywords that have the potential to bring a greater number of visits, it will be nearly impossible.

Thus, it is recommended to write posts with more than 300 words. It's not hard when you really understand the topic you're talking about.

Conclusion

As you can see, with some simple SEO techniques you can improve the traffic coming to your blog from the search engines. I hope you enjoyed these 5 easy ways to improve the SEO of a blog!

What is the difference between padding and margins?

For those who would like to know more about HTML and CSS, in this post we will learn the differences between margin and padding CSS properties that are used to add space between the HTML elements, thus preventing the elements from getting 'stuck' together.

Although both have similar functions, each work in a different way.

1. Padding determines the inner margins, being used for changing the distance between the content of a given element and its border.
2. Margin is the space outside of an element affecting how far the element is away from other elements.

For a better understanding of how the padding and margin work, take a look at the picture below:

Difference between margin and padding

Just as you have the option to define the borders for each side of your HTML elements (eg. borders for the sidebar), you can do the same with the margin and padding properties. All you need to to do is to change the top, right, bottom and left values​​.

The values that you can use include: pixels (px), centimeters (cm), millimeters (mm). em units (em), x-height (ex), inches (in), picas (pc) and point sizes (pt).

When using margin and padding, you need to add a value for each 4 corners of an element, as follows: top, right, bottom, left. Each value must refer to the each side of the HTML element. The first value is for the top, and they follow a clockwise direction, so the value would be close to the right, then bottom, and finally, left.

Example 1:

padding:5px 15px 5px 15px;

• top padding is of 5px 
• right padding is of 15px 
• bottom padding is of 5px 
• left padding is of 15px

margin: 10px 5px 10px 5px;

• top margin is of 10px
• right margin is of 5px
• bottom margin is of 10px
• left margin is of 5px

If you define a single value (instead of 4), the distance applies on the all sides, i.e. it will be applied on the 4 sides of the HTML element that you want to modify.

Example 2:
padding: 5px (top and bottom) 15px (left and right);
margin: 10px (top and bottom) 5px (left and right);

If it helps you visually, think of an A4 page of type inside a picture frame. The margin is the space between the edge of the sheet of paper and the other elements (the parts of the frame), while the padding would be the space between the edge of the sheet and where the type starts on the page. The border would be the edge of the sheet of paper.

It's probably easier to understand if you have borders, then it also becomes obvious which one to use. Do you want "space" after the border (outside the element = margin) or before the border (inside the element = padding).

Solution for "Rich snippets not showing"

During my microdata coding i quite accidentally realized, that "rich snippets are not showing" doesn't always mean "rich snippets not working"! My research was about nesting and inheritance of Schema.org's classes, and, playing with the Google's structured data testing tool, i detected a case where my microdata markup was correctly validated and worked properly, but rich snippets of this code weren't showing. After some tests i got to know about two causes of not shown rich snippets:
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Authorship markup: how to combine correctly several kinds of it?

Yes, exactly, how to correctly combine them? More: why is it useful and needful to use several authorship markup and whether it produces any SEO-profit?

Some SEOs dispute about differences of using author and publisher properties, another SEOs advice to use only rel="author"... I say: use all you might use simultaneously! (it's needless to say, don't use something, what doesn't fit your context and could be ranked as e.g. rich snippets spam etc ).
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How to use Picasa-web-albums with your Google+ Page's photos

This article shows how to manage your Google+ Page's photo collection using Picasa-web-albums.

Recently I described how to always use Picasa-web-albums, rather than Google+ photos, to work with the images that are stored in your Google account.

One issue was that there was no way to use PWA to work with the photo's uploaded to a Google+ Page, rather than an individual Google+ profile.

And this was highlighted when Google introduced an auto-enhancement feature which could be disabled using Picasa-web-albums, but not using Google+ Photos.

However a new feature introduced to Google+ Pages means that you can work around this.

How to access Google+ Page photo albums using Picasa-web-albums

Set up a separate password for your Google+ Page..

Log out of Google / Blogger / Picasa-web-albums (if you log out of one, you are generally removed from the others too).

Log back in again, but this time using your newly created Google+ Page account.

Point your web-browser to Picasa-web-albums, using the do-not-re-direct address:   https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/myphotos?noredirect=1

Job Done!    

You can now use Picasa-web-albums  like normal, including access to features like:

• Turning off image auto-correction
• The (far nicer) PWA upload features
• Sharing your photos on any website, not just on Google+

And of course you still have access to the Google+ Photos features, like editing pictures without changing their URL.

Disadvantages / Issues

There's always one!

In this case, it's that you need to be logged into Google using a different account from the one that's the underlying Page owner.   You can use any of the other Google tools   (Maps, Blogger, probably even AdSense) - but it will be with the Google account that was created for your page, rather than with your personal account.

And if you manage multiple pages, you will need to think carefully about exactly how each one is set up, and what account you need to use to work with it.

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Related Articles

Understanding Picasa and Picasa-web-albums

Editing photos on-line using Google+ Photos

How to set up a separate password for your Google+ Page

Stop Google from auto-enhancing your images

Sharing photos from your Google+ Photos albums outside of Google+