Setting up your website’s blog is a task that can be enjoyed if done right. Most importantly, you need to understand what is it that you want to achieve with a blog? Is it educating audiences about your category or do you want to talk about your products and brand or is it a mix of both? In any case, one thing needs to be clear and that is your blog’s core objective. One obvious aspect is traffic acquisition, but what is the intent of the blog? This will bring you to the strategy you need to build for your content.
Content strategy is the first step of drawing an outline of your website’s blog section and also your website’s content. But when it comes to your blog, you can definitely have a little bit of leeway and create lateral content along with content that is core to your category. In addition to this, having the right SEO tips that come in handy and are useful is important for a blog’s SEO success. A good to have for this will be a managed SEO provider that can help you set up a good blog with a content and SEO strategy in place.
A successful blog is a sign of trust for brands and businesses at the initial stage because it paves way for customers to engage and interact with the brand at a one-to-one level.
What you should do to set up the blog section of your website?
1. Researching the right keywords
Remember that the base of your SEO success always lies in finding the right and relevant keywords that fit like a glove with your content strategy. No matter what the search volumes are, always choose intent and purpose over volume, because people are looking for information on Google and stumble upon this information when the URLs of this relevant content appear in SERPs.
Use tools like Ahrefs, and SEMrush to do keyword research and find the ones that are relevant to your category. Ensure that the keywords are optimized as per the article and not randomly, or else your blog articles will not be ranked higher. They will be lower than those following the right practices.
2. Optimize images for blog
Images are more attractive than text but take longer to load. If you don’t pay attention to the size and quality of the images, they may slow down your site.
You need to make sure you are using images that are optimized for faster loading. Another trick you can use to optimize your search engine images is to use a descriptive name and an alt tag. These tags help search engines understand what your image is. They also help visually impaired users because their screen readers can read the alternative text behind them.
3. Title tags and meta descriptions
The title and meta description tags are snippets of HTML code in the title of a web page. They help search engines understand the content of the blog. The title and meta description tags of a page often appear when the page appears in search engine results.
Tips to write title tags and meta descriptions:
- The title should be highly relevant to the content that appears on a particular page.
- Place important keywords and phrases in front of the name tag to get attention.
- Write naturally for visitors and avoid overstuffing with keywords.
- Avoid duplication. Each page has a different theme, so it should have a unique title.
- It is possible to put your brand name at the end of the name tag, but focus on the first delivery of your message.
- Keep it up to 60 to 64 characters.
- Make it compelling.
To write a metadata description:
- Have unique descriptions for each page of your site.
- Create an impressive description with relevant keywords. Make sure what is described is available to the searcher.
- Stimulate curiosity within the reader. Provide enough information to explain what the site is about, but not too much to destroy the cause of curiosity.
- Include a call to action in your meta description to give readers clear instructions on what action to take and what it means to them.
- Keep your meta description between 150 and 154 characters. If they are too long, search engines will truncate more characters.
4. Ensure URL lengths are short and crisp
Now that we’ve discussed meta and title tags, let’s start with the basics of URLs. The first element we want to discuss is length, and that is a big problem. But if you really take it all apart, deciding on the length of the URL is easy. The shorter the better.
So somewhere around 50-60 characters is a good number. If you continue (say 80+ characters), it will probably have a negative impact on your rating.
5. Content Delivery Network (CDN)
The one big thing you want to set up on the back-end is the content delivery network, which allows your blog’s articles/pages to be “delivered” from a server near where someone is trying to deliver.
This in turn speeds up your site’s load time and improves the user experience for the people who visit your site. If you do DIY hosting, you have to set it up yourself, with something like Cloudflare that can be provided by your hosting facilitator. With basic back page features, you’re ready to focus on the front of the page.
6. Interlink your blog articles
Once you have started writing your blog articles, ensure that you are interlinking the blogs with one another because it will only pass the SEO juice and consolidate your blog section, and help in ranking better. This should be your top priority once you get the blog up and ready.
Conclusion
These steps or points rather are a precursor to blogging and should be taken as the first important stepping stone to your blogging journey. Blogging is a never-ending and a journey worth enjoying so make sure that you are doing a lot of it and in tandem with the needs of your audience. Also, if you want to read more about SEO rankings, here is an article explaining the same. If you have any queries for us, please share them in the comments section below.
