Eight Simple Tips To Help Improve Your SEO And DA

One of the biggest minefields when it comes to blogging and running your own website is all the technical stuff that goes on behind the scenes and while content is always king and what you write/ the images you take are so important having good SEO will help your blog to grow. Every time Moz has an update I see plenty of bloggers getting down as they’ve done loads of work and either stayed the same or dropped. Firstly what’s important to know is that Moz doesn’t crawl every single site every single time so if you drop down it might be that you weren’t crawled and not because you did anything wrong. Obviously, your DA isn’t the most important thing but it can help to get opportunities especially sponsored posts from SEO agencies/ brands.

I work in digital marketing as my full-time grown-up job so have a reasonable handle on ways to optimise your blog in order to push your SEO and improve your overall blog. Here are some of the easiest fixes.

Adding and Optimising Meta Descriptions

You need to ensure that both your blog overall and each individual post has a meta description as this is what shows up on Google under the URL giving an overview of your post. A few months ago there was a Google algorithm change that increased the character limit on meta descriptions so it’s worth going over any older ones to ensure they’re still long enough. For more information about adding/ optimising meta descriptions check out my post on it.

Adding and Optimising Image Alt- Text

Image Alt Text is a description of your images so when someone does an image search on Google if your keywords in the image match their search you could come up. These are also very useful for people who are blind or partially sighted and using software to read allowed your blog post when it goes over an image it will say the alt-text so ‘Sandy Beach in Bournemouth’ works so much better than ‘Bournemouth’ or the dreaded ‘IMG0754’. For more information on Alt- Text and how to add it in click here.

Fixing Broken Links

Broken links are one of the biggest banes of my life and should be something you check on a monthly basis to stop it from getting out of control. If your site has a lot of broken links Google won’t see your blog in a good light so it’s worth tackling them head-on. Generally, I find most of my broken links are from other bloggers’ comments where their blog no longer exists or they typed the URL incorrectly, or it happens when I am linking to a product that no longer exists. For more information on how to check broken links and how to edit/ change them check out my broken links post.

Decreasing Your Moz Spam Score

When you check your DA through Moz you’ll see a figure marked as a spam score which is a number ranging from 0 to 17 and the lower this figure is the better. If your spam score is high then it could mean Google has penalised the site but a lot of the flags are pretty easy to change. Check out my post here about what all the flags are and what to do about them.

Checking Your Blog Page Speed

I’m sure everyone can relate to how annoying it is when you go onto a website and it takes forever to load, sometimes this causes me to click off as I just don’t have the time to be waiting around. We all want to make sure that our sites run fast and although some of it is more about the coding there are some simple checks and tidy-ups you can do to ensure yours is as quick as possible. Check out my post about checking and improving your page speed here.

Choosing The Right Keywords

Having the right keywords in place on your site is one of the best ways to rank well on Google so it’s something you should think about every single time you write a post. Of course, ranking higher on Google will help your traffic but also your authority as if Google thinks you know what you’re talking about in one area that’s a good sign. Need more information about the importance of keywords and how to choose them? Click here

Link Building

Link building is an incredibly important aspect of SEO and can have a great impact on your site. There are a few different ways to do link building and it’s best to diversify and cover all of these areas. When you comment on other bloggers posts generally there’s a URL box to add in your link or where it pulls a link to your latest post and while most of these will be no-f0llow the more you have from high ranking blogs the better, plus it’s a great way to connect with other bloggers. Guest blogging on other people’s sites is a great way to build links such as taking part in features and linkys, but also taking part in tag posts with other bloggers. There’s a whole array of other ways to link build such as offering comments on a topic in exchange for a link, writing guest posts for brand/ company blogs, pitching to sites, etc. At the end of the day, the more links you get pointing to your site from good quality places the better.

Having a Sitemap

A .xml sitemap file is a list of all of the pages on your website which should be indexed by search engines and is coding that Google, Bing, and other engines read to inform them what relevant pages are on your site, the significance of the content on your site and when they were last uploaded. If you’re on WordPress the easiest thing to do is download a Plugin called ‘Google XML Sitemap’ and once you activate it you’re done as each time you publish a new post the plugin will update and send your URL to Google.

If you have tried all you can and you still feel overwhelmed with everything involved in SEO, that’s perfectly normal. It’s an ever-changing field, and with every Google algorithm update, there are new factors to keep in mind and lessons to learn. It’s basically a full-time job – which is why many companies and entrepreneurs choose to hire an SEO agency to take care of everything on-site so you can focus your energies elsewhere. There’s no shame in asking for help when you really need it – particularly if that help will give you the results you really need!”