This is a guest post by Satrap who blogs at BlogStash.com and shares make money online tips on his blog. In this post, he is going to tell us 8 ways which we can use to optimize our blogs for both the search engines and the readers.
We often hear how important it is to optimize blogs for search engines and rightly so. Search engine optimization is an important and crucial part of a successful blog. By having a well search engine optimized blog, you increase your chances of ranking well in the search engines for your targeted keywords, enabling you to drive quality targeted traffic to your blog.
There is no doubt that search engine optimization is crucial to the success of your blog. However, a well search engine optimized blog alone isn’t enough to keep that traffic coming back to your blog.
In order to keep your visitors happy and coming back for more, you have to optimize your blog for your visitors as well. Optimizing your blog for both visitors and search engines is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your blog and also keeping them coming back over and over again.
Thankfully, some of the elements used for optimizing a blog for search engines go hand to hand with the elements used for optimizing a blog for visitors, which means you can use the same methods to optimize your blog not only for search engines, but also for your visitors.
Here are 8 ways to optimize your blog for both visitors and search engines:
1. Self-Explanatory URLs
Having your keywords in the url of your pages is another important SEO factor that helps you rank well for them. It also makes it easier for your visitors to remember that url if they decide to come back to it latter.
2. Fast Loading Blog
It allows search engines to go through your blog faster, thus making it easier for them to find what they are looking for. At the same time, having a fast loading blog is crucial for keeping your visitors on your blog for longer. People tend to push the back button if a page takes too long to load.
Do Read: How To Speed Up WordPress Blog In 3 Simple Steps.
3. Easy Navigation
Its almost self explanatory, make it easy for your visitors to navigate around your blog and find what they are looking for faster and easier, while at the same time, a good navigation menu makes it easy for search engine spiders to search and find the right content on your blog.
4. Good Titles
Having a clear title lets visitors know what the whole post is going to be about. Plus, when it comes to SEO, page title (post title) is an important factor. Using your keywords in the title gives you a better chance of ranking well for that keyword. And, when search engines show your page in the result after someone searches for that keyword, having a good attention grabbing title, will entice searchers to visit your page.
Do Read: How To Craft Search Engine Optimized Titles That Get Clicks
5. Well Arranged Content
Simple things like bold titles and content organized by paragraphs, allow your readers to easily and quickly go through your content, leaving them more time to explore other pages of your blog. At the same time, well arranged content allows search engine spiders to quickly find the topic of your page.
6. Easy To Read Text
Make sure people can read your text easily. Avoid too small or too big fonts, or fonts with colors that don’t sit well with the background color of your blog. Search engines don’t like pages with very small text and text with colors almost the same as the background color and might consider such pages as spam considering it a blackhat technique. Of course, text with extreme sizes or bad colors can be hard on your visitor’s eyes as well.
7. Images With ALT Attribute
We all know that search engines can not index the image itself, but they can index text. Therefore, its a good idea to use ALT text for images displayed on your blog. On the other hand, alt text can help a visitor who isn’t able to see the image (browser issues, visual problems and etc), understand what the image is all about.
8. Proper 404 Error Page
Having a proper 404 page lets search engines find and index the correct pages on your blog. And for surfers, nothing is worst than to arrive at a page with nothing on it, no link, no navigation menu, no direction, just a big old 404 error message. Having prepared a 404 page with links pointing to appropriate pages, makes your blog more user-friendly and keeps your visitors on your blog for longer.
Final Words…
Of course, when it comes to optimizing your blog, there are other factors as well, like having quality backlinks, useful content that readers will appreciate and more. But most of them are good either for search engine optimization or optimizing for visitors, but not for both.
The above mentioned elements however, are a few things that let you hit two birds with one stone, simultaneously optimizing your blog for both search engines and visitors.
These tips are practical but also vital. I will also add that you should link to relevent content within your blog using anchor text.
Great point ashley. Linking to other relevant posts is both useful for readers and great for se optimization.
Satrap – Great tips on building both a user friendly and search engine friendly blog. I was aware of most of these, but I liked your number 8 tip. I have never thought about implementing a proper 404 page, but I can see the benefit of having one so I will look into implementing that right away. Thanks for sharing.
You are welcome John. Yeah having a proper 404 page is one thing that lots of us seem to ignore simply because we don’t really know about it.
I like the easy to read text, like this post is, with subheading to guide you through. I cannot stand a bunch of text, not knowing where the post is leading and if you are wasting your time or not?
I am with you Mitz, Its not very attractive when you have a whole bunch of text all jammed together. Thanks for commenting.
Hi Satrap,
This is a very helpful post for most bloggers. Many bloggers really don’t put into practice the usage of ALT text for images. The other tips you said here are also helpful, such as the part on easy to read text and easy navigation.
Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for your feedback Felicia. Yeah, I myself ignored using images and alt text for a long long time. But a while ago I came to my sense and started using images with alt text and I have already seen some benefits on a few posts.
easy navigation and clean design with optimize 404 page make some good impressions on visitor and make them come back.
Excellent point Isha. Its amazing to me how many sites are out here that you can’t even find your way around them. If a reader has to spend more than a few seconds to find what he or she is looking for and a link that points to it, your navigation system needs an upgrade. Thanks for the comment Isha.
I agree easy to read and well arranged content is something user’s and search engines look for
Thanks for the comment Usman. Well arranged content that is easy to read and understand is 100% appreciated by both readers and search engines spiders as it makes their job easier and faster, whcih means both can venture to other parts of your site. Readers stay longer on your site and spiders index more of your contents and pages faster.
Hi, thanks for a great read and some great tips – co-incidentally, I was watching a clip showing Google’s Matt Cutts talking about seo and he actually said that self explanatory urls are taken into account by Google so they are not just easier for visitors to understand, they are also better for Google! – I have only wordpress blogs and it is very easy to customise the page/post urls in the permalinks section.
I also always use the alt attribute in pictures and write a short description for each too as I am getting some traffic just through google image searches.
Thanks again satrap, will check out your blog too!
Hi Alisson.
Yeah, I have seen the video you are talking about and when I was writing the post, it backed me up by giving me 100% assurance that self explanatory are not only liked by visitors but by SE spiders as well. It gives both more time to venture to other parts of your site. It keeps the visitors on your site for longer and also enables spiders to index faster thus being able to index other content and ages of your blog.
Thanks for commenting Alison.
Such simple tips but it seems like a lot of people forget these! Thanks for listing them down. I have one question though: is it better to just use keywords in the URL of your pages or is better to have the entire title of that page in your URL?
I think these days people are doing search engine optimization for just crawler sage and not for surfers. You have come up with the solution to satisfy both. What I think is if you optimize your site for visitors, search engine will be happy automatically.
Title optimization and good contents are always liked by the Google. According to the 2011 techniques, Google only pay attention to the links that are from good contents.