SEO for Blogs: How You Can Rank Better on Google?

Search Engine Optimization has come a long way. The days of keyword stuffing & black hat tactics have been overtaken by the numerous updates Google gives to its algorithm. It is said, Google makes around 500 adjustments to its search engine algorithm every year. If you would want to take a look at some of the major changes which Google has done for their different updates, you can refer to this Moz Timeline of history. Google has made it a point to elevate quality content over scrappy content to ensure the readers get best of what they want to know about. But how do you ensure that your blog is in the good books of the search results and ranks higher consistently? Some of these pointers below will help you to meet the ask of what’s needed to rank your content & rank it better than your competitors

• Decide on your Blog post Title Intelligently:

Blog post titles are one of the primary factors for Google to determine the relevancy of the post amongst thousands of others. Getting a well-researched blog post title can get your post get higher relevancy on searched keywords. One of the research conducted by Moz suggested that the ideal character size for blog post title is from 56-60 characters. If you would want to make all the words visible of your title in the search results, it is better to use normal case than use upper case. Upper case characters take up more space & the extra letters are cut off by the search engine preview.

• Choose your Keywords wisely:

At one point of time, Keywords was the holy grail of how Google ranked web pages. However, with search engines getting a lot more smarter dirty practices like keyword stuffing were taken care of with regular updates & learning. However, Google still considers Keywords as an integral part to rank your content. Whenever choosing the topic, do ensure that your most important keywords related to the topic takes precedence while deciding the post title (which is in the 60 character cut off limit prescribed earlier).Ensuring your important keywords appear in your post title and url structure is a great tactic to tell the search engine about the relevance of the topic. However, you have to ensure you do not repeat your keywords one too many in the context of the post and keep it as natural as possible.

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While deciding on the variations of keywords & topics, you can use the Keyword planner tool by Google to check the demand of your keywords & topics. The tool gives you some detailed insights on the various possibilities along with a device wise split and search trends on the keyword list. The more popular the keywords, the tougher your competition will get to get higher in the search results.

• Trust a good SEO Plugin:

When you own a blog, chances are that you might need a plugin to do the lengthy SEO work for you. If your blog is hosted on WordPress, we recommend Yoast plugin for WordPress which makes it easier for a non-technical person to get an indicator as to how good have you optimized your post for the search engines. The three signals (Green, Yellow , Red) give you a fair indicator of how your post is doing in terms of overall content optimization & also gives suggestions as to what else you must be doing to make the post SEO friendly. That’s great for a start right?

• Make it Relevant, Make it Long!

Are long blog posts the future of content marketing? This post by Kissmetrics does support this theory, where they have seen an exponential rise on the long blog posts in terms of traffic. The length of a blog post is subjective to individual. However, Google considers longer posts as informative particular to a topic when written in depth and providing useful information.

How about us? We experience a 32% rise in traffic to blog posts which are more than 1,500 words are above when analysed for the last one year.

• The Age of Social Search:

In a study conducted by Moz some time ago, they co-related Google+ as one of the most important factors with SEO. Although, Google has denied time and again that social media is not one of the primary factors on which they rank content, different studies have suggested otherwise. With Google showing personalized results to users who are connected with their Google accounts while searching, a content your friend might have +1’d has also an equal chance of being visible to you on the first page. Google thinks the result might be of more relevance to you since your friend (on Google+) has already seen the page on the same topic you are searching and also liked it. That is one of the primary reasons, we pay special attention to our Google+ page to increase interactions.

4 crazy SEO myths that need to be put to bed immediately

There are quite a few myths that are flying around in the SEO world and it is rather interesting as to how these myths actually gain traction when Matt Cutts and other major SEO people keep telling us that it isn’t the case yet we still rely on these myths when we approach clients. So I have decided that it is time to put a little end to them.

1. Social signals like shares and Tweets improve rankings

Google doesn’t really have access to Facebook or Twitter. The only thing that social media signals are used for is validating links to a site. For example, if a post has five shares but 100 links, obviously it’s unnatural and Google will be hesitant in ranking that particular page.

If the same piece of content has 100 shares and 100 or so links, it means that the piece of content actually has something great to say and Google will then rank it accordingly.

Ultimately, Google uses it as a link validator if you will. It is a clever way to ensure that we are keeping within Google’s Quality Guidelines instead of trying to game the system.

2. Meta descriptions affect my rankings

This is a simple one to debunk. Descriptions have no real value to where your site is placed in the organic rankings. It can help with the click through rate because you have 150 characters of prime real estate to place riveting content and an enticing call to action which can trigger click through rates.

Yes it is important, but only for click through rates. Google has announced that it doesn’t look at it for indexing purposes. Additionally it can change it as it sees fit. This is much like the Meta Keywords section.

3. The more pages of content I have the better I rank

Some believe that this is a cut-and-dry topic because people love to believe that the more they produce the better they rank. Clearly they are wrong. If you have loads of rubbish content versus your competitor who has fewer pages of more quality, you are not going to outrank him (or her).

Google looks at your site and places value on quality and relevance to the particular search query not on the amount of content you. If you look at Webmaster tools, you will also find that not all your content is indexed and if it does get indexed it may not be for very long. Stop focusing on quantity, it’s a wasted exercise.

4. H1 tags are the most important aspect

Well no, Google doesn’t access your site from the H1 tag. It crawls the code from the top down, so essentially the title of the page is more important, as is the URL. Never mind the fact that Google can devalue the importance of the H tags as it goes down the page because over optimised tags are a distraction which cause content to be unnatural and for crummy robots.

Rather focus your content structure on users. They read it after all. Place the important parts and the top and then work your way down but keep it flowing and please don’t look at SEO when writing. Look at the topic.

A little secret for you, H tags are styling elements created by CSS folks not SEO.

Those are the myths that boggle my mind when I see people going all crazy about. Clients may not understand it and still think they are rad tactics but this is where you need to consult or guide as to what is right or wrong.

What crazy SEO myths have you come across lately?