Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is crucial to the success of, just about, any website out there. Without SEO, traffic will dwindle to a halt and without traffic a website is worthless. For this reason, it is critical to the healthiness of your website to make sure you apply SEO when you are blogging. With this in mind, here are three SEO tips I have adopted over my time blogging which others may find useful to get into the habit to do too, which will help improve the SEO ranking of blogs and articles online.
 

#1 WordPress? Use Yoast

For all those that have adopted to using WordPress to perform all their blogging duties, the best plugin I have found to make your articles and website as good for search engine traffic as possible is Yoast. What I lose about Yoast is that they don’t just help with the overall SEO of your website by enabling web users to add sitemaps, change meta tags and so on. Yoast offers a traffic light system to inform bloggers of how well SEOed their articles are (green, amber and red). If your articles are not green, you will get tips as to how to make your articles SEO better.
As well as this, they now have a traffic light system for how readable your content is, which is a great addition to Yoast. People put far too much emphasis on SEO sometimes and forget just how unreadable content can be if you concentrate just on SEO. Yoast enables bloggers to get the best of both worlds with their articles, which I have found to be the best way to go when blogging.
 

#2 Use Headings 1 and Headings 2

Although this may not always be possible, the way articles are structured, in terms of the headings used, makes a huge difference to how Google and other search engines view your articles.

• If you are not using headings yet, start using them! They make a huge difference to articles organically as they help search engines understand just exactly what your articles are about, by adding more importance to the headings content.
• When possible, try using sub-headings/heading 2 to break up your content more. This will help make your article more indexable too, since your article will have, to what Google will see it as, a contents page for every one of your articles based on the headings used.

#3 Don’t Include Stop Words in URLs

Stop words are words such as ‘the’, ‘a’, ‘to’, ‘of’, ‘or’ and so on. They are very common words in the English language and carry no benefit, in terms of SEO, whatsoever. Therefore, when publishing articles, make sure your URL is both:

1. Representative of the content
2. Contains no stop words at all. The URL should be filled with keywords and only contain stop words when it becomes a necessity.

For example, one of my websites, FreePoemAnalysis.com, the structure of the articles tend to follow ‘Analysis of Poem name by Poet’s name‘. However, for SEO, the ‘by’ is removed because it is a stop word. However, if there is a stop word in the poem’s name, such as If by Rudyard Kipling, it has to be included in the URL, since it is a crucial SEO keyword for the poem.