Improving on page SEO has many benefits for bloggers and website owners that are easy to implement. It's a matter of knowing what to do when writing posts. This article will show you several areas of focus that will help you connect with your ideal customers and boost your site's overall SEO, each time you write a blog post.
On page SEO let's Google know when your content is relevant and useful for a search and show your page in the results.
The best way to gain a competitive edge in the SEO world is knowing how to make search engines completely understand your content. On page SEO is the way to do accomplish this.
Your Challenge as a Blogger
As a new blogger there are so many moving parts. It's hard to know what which direction to take. Should you focus on content, SEO, sales and marketing, there are so many things to do and so little time. It can be overwhelming, especially if you have a family, a 9 to 5 job or both.
On page SEO is important when it comes to reaching a larger audience of organic traffic. There are many components that should be addressed, like images.
Images are the Unsung Heroes
Images are the unsung heroes of SEO and a valuable asset to bloggers. The reason is because they add to the overall user experience and they provide an easy way to boost your on page SEO.
Even small changes like updating the alt tags on your images can make a difference.
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Have you ever read a blog post that had no images? It's hard to find a post that has no images at all. But imagine how it would be if most of the blogs you read had no images. Pretty boring, right?
Yet many bloggers overlook images as a way to get eyes on their content. Many times they give very little time and attention to picking out the right images for their posts and optimizing them so that they are found by more people.
Images give life to your blog post and they tell the reader (as well as Google) what your post is about.
If you've done a Google search you know that videos, text (news) and images (shown below) are part of search results (SERP) but these opportunities are commonly overlooked by content creators.
Where Are You Taking Your Readers?
So the question is, have you taken a look at your images lately? Where do they lead users who click on them to find the content you're writing about?
Do they lead to your blog, or to landing pages that contain your offers? Do they lead to a path that goes nowhere? When someone clicks on your image, do they have a title and short description that tells them what it's about?
Did you know that search engines can't read your images without a signal from "alt text"? So optimizing your images using this signal is an important part of your post's ability to be included in search results.
While it might be time consuming if you have a large number of pages, it's always well worth it if you can make changes that will result in a boost to your traffic.
If you can rank at least one of the images on each post to the first page of search results, it can go a long way to getting more potential customers to view your content.
Here are 10 Improvements You Can Make to Improve On Page SEO
1. Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness. Prove to Google that the content you're creating on your site can be trusted. You do this by creating quality content that highlights your knowledge.
To accomplish this, you don't need to be a rocket scientist. Lots of regular people who excel in various topics have sites that are optimized and ranking on Google.
Use your hobbies, skills and interests to show that you're an authority in your field. Let Google and your audience know that you know what you're talking about and build authority with your audience.
1. Alt Text - Write SEO Friendly Alt Text that tells Google and readers what the image is about.
2. Compressing images (speeds up load time). I use Thrive Themes that has a compression program that they provide for free that allows me to choose "lossy file compression". to make sure my files are loading at an appropriate speed.
3. Create Your Own Unique Images - This means that you should be original and take your own pictures from your surroundings. The web is being overrun with the same stock images which can result in penalties for duplicate content. Do you want to use the same images as your competitors?
Canva is a tool you can use to create images that can be used on your website. Use this tool to create unique, one of a kind images and videos you take with your camera for your blog. They also have a library of stock photos that you can use as well as a second choice.
Canva allows you to create keyword rich file names that you can upload to your site. Watch a quick video that explains how it works.
4. File Names - File name is a ranking factor in Google. So the goal is to use descriptive, keyword rich names. For example, "IMG_43423423.jpg" doesn't help Google understand what an image of a girl walking a dog is about. But a descriptive file name like "girl_walking_dog.jpg" would be much better.
5. File Path - Is also a ranking factor in Google. So the names of the subfolders where your images are kept is very important because it makes up the file path.
6. Page Title - In search results, your images automatically generate a title and snippet that best explains each result and how it relates to the user query.
If you haven't entered a snippet, Google will take the first few sentences from your blog post up to a certain character limit.
There are times when the first two sentences won't do your post justice. So it's important to make sure your title and description are optimized. RankMath is a powerful SEO plugin that has features that allow you see data that will help you to optimize your titles and descriptions before publishing.
7. Meta tags - Meta tags are snippets of text that describe a page's content; the meta tags don't appear on the page itself, but they work in the background in the page's source code.
Meta tags are essentially little content descriptors that help tell search engines what a web page is about. They are displayed in the HTML code as <title> and <description> elements. Watch this video to learn more about metadata.
8. Image Format - Using JPEGS versus PNG files makes a difference when it comes to page loading times. PNG files have better image quality but they are much larger, causing more time to be needed for download.
9. Mobile Friendly Images - You will need images on your site that will scale based on the size of the screen the user has on their device.
If your images don't scale, that will result in a bad user experience and people will likely bounce away from those images or even from your site altogether.
10. Add Images to Your SiteMap - This is a big one. Using a sitemap is important. You can add images to your sitemap manually or use a tool to create a new sitemap that just has images. No matter how you do it, make sure images are somewhere in your sitemaps.
Google uses your sitemaps to crawl your site and if you want images to be crawled and indexed for search, this is a must-have activity.
We use the sitemap solution provided in the RankMath SEO plugin. We used to use the Yoast SEO plugin but RankMath in my opinion it works much better in helping bloggers reach their SEO goals.
No Need to Hire an SEO Expert...
At least not if you're able to access your images and make the improvements on the back end of your blog.
If you don't have a blog that allows you to access the metadata in your images, consider making a change to a self hosted WordPress blog that allows you to do just that.
If you are the person who regularly updates your blog, (especially if you built your blog), these are changes that you should have no problem making.
For those who think that SEO is too hard, maybe there are one or two items on the list that you can do to improve your rankings and outsource the rest.
These changes can give your images and therefore your site a much needed boost. If you have no idea whatsoever how to make the updates, you might consider hiring an expert to make the changes.
The goal is to have any images from your blog posts included in the first page of search results. Those images should be sending readers to your landing pages with offers or other strong blog content.
Stay tuned for more business building tools you can use to grow your online business.
Organize Your Blog for Success
Use these daily, weekly and monthly worksheets designed with bloggers and business owners in mind, to help you reach your goals.