With Blogmas season nearly upon us, hundreds of bloggers are flooding to their keyboards to type out a post for every day of December. But how can you help your blogs rank well on search engines?
Blogmas is a blogger’s celebration of the Christmas period, in which a blog post is scheduled in to go live for every day of December. It’s a busy time for the bloggers that choose to join in and it can sometimes be hard to stand out from the crowd. I’ve put together a basic guide to SEO to help bloggers give their blog posts the best chances of flourishing amongst the other Blogmas posts.
What does SEO mean for bloggers?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, you can find a full beginners breakdown of how to manage SEO for your blog here. This essentially refers to the quality that Google (or other search engines) ranks your website. If they rank it well and deem it to be high quality, you are more likely to receive organic traffic from search engines to your blog.
This is particularly important when writing your posts because you can add in a few simple things to help your blog rank higher on Google.
Learn more about going self-hosted and having more control over your blog.
Name your Blogmas posts correctly with relevant keywords
Think about what users would search when looking for your Blogmas post. For example, let’s say your blog post is about Christmas films to watch. Let’s look at some potential titles, both good and bad:
| Blog post title | Good points | Bad points |
| Blogmas: Top 10 Christmas Films |
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| The best Christmas films to watch in December |
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| My favourite Christmas films |
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| Blogmas day 8: Christmas films |
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Choosing a name for your post is important and can take practice. I think there could be a debate about whether Blogmas being used in the title is a good thing or not. It could date the posts, which is a bad thing, but it also allows the posts to have the chance to come up in more searches.
It’s a good idea to name your blog title in a way that answers a question/hits keywords that would be asked in a question. Think about how the user will be searching and try to write a response in your blog’s title.
Write relevant Meta Data for your blog post
Meta Data is the snippet of text that comes up under your blog post’s title in the search engine. This is usually a line or two that summarises the post using keywords and relevant terms. It should be short and precise, whilst offering more information than what was listed in the title. If you’re working on WordPress and you use .org then you can download the Plugin Yoast to help you with this. If you don’t use WordPress.org then I’d suggest giving a google as to your blogging platform and how you can add Meta Data.
It’s important to recognise what performs well here, for example talking about what Blogmas is wouldn’t be the right thing to put here. For the Christmas films example, the meta data would read something like:
A list of my top ten favourite Christmas films that are perfect for a cosy movie night in with your family, including comedy, romance and classics.
Use keywords regularly in your post
Do some research before you begin to write your post. See who has written something similar, see what comes up on Google when you search terms around your topic. Make a list of the keywords you notice and then add these into your post. Don’t go overboard, and make sure the keywords make sense with where you’ve added them in your post. You still want your post to be readable, but it must also be relevant.
Optimise your Blogmas images for SEO
There’s two main things you can do to best optimise your images for SEO, reduce the image size and add alt text to every image. Google looks at your page load speed and takes this into consideration when ranking your webpage. To reduce your load speed you should upload smaller sized images, this will make a huge difference as large images are a big cause of slow load speeds on websites.
When you upload your image into your media library you’ll see an option to change the Alt Text, this is somewhere to include more keywords and try to get this image to come up in a Google Image search. You could use the same as the title of your blog post if it’s a blogger header, or describe the photo in more detail if you want to spend more time on this.
Include links to other posts in your blog
Include both internal and external links in your blog post. Internal links refer to links to your other posts, for Blogmas, this should be linking to other Blogmas posts. This helps to build up the credibility of your site and also help keep users on your blog. External links are links to websites you don’t own, they benefit by showing Google you are researching your content and can be trusted by linking to highly credible sites. These could be in the form of friend’s Blogmas posts, which in tern would suggest they would link back to your blog and help you build your credibility.
So there’s my overview of how SEO can help your Blogmas posts stand out, I hope I’ve been able to help!
This is so helpful! Thank you so much, Beth!
I think I’ll probably do a “12 Days of Blogmas” this year as I don’t have much time!! SEO is so important, especially come December, so as a newly self-hosted blogger, it’s going to be interesting, & I’m sure, at times, a little tricky, to employ so much SEO thinking as I compose my posts! These are some excellent tips; I’m really going to have to give my titles some thought x
Great blogmas tips! I love the chart that explains how a title can be good or bad because of keywords. It’s a nice visual explanation.