Marketing
The only SEO guide you’ll ever need
the purrfect SEO
Content is king, and it always will be but if you cannot market your work, if it’s not reaching a wider audience, you are probably missing out on a lot of things.
It’s called a bestselling book, and not the best-written book for a reason.
METADATA:
- Blog Title limit — max 60 characters.
- The self-explanatory tiles are mostly preferred because they play a decisive role in your ranking by increasing the click-through rates (CTR).
- Description — max 156 characters (not words)
TIPS:
- If the keyword you are targeting is Cricket vs Soccer, then the Metadata should start with something like “Cricket and Soccer, both are widely played games…”
- If you are using any external links in the blog that redirect the user to somewhere else, then do not use the `[name](link.com)` format (default markdown format), they contribute nothing to SEO, instead, use:-
<a href = “https://www.facebook.com" rel=”noopener noreferrer nofollow”
target=”_blank” >Facebook</a>.3. Image format must be webp, as they are best among png, jpeg, jpg, svg, etc. webp gives the best compression with the best image quality.
4. The canonical link section is also important to add in an HTML page or .md file for your blog (if using docs creation engines like Hugo or Docusaurus), I am not sure it works but helps in the SEO of the blog.
<head>
<link rel=”canonical” href=”https://signoz.io/blog/splunk-alternatives/"/>
</head>5. You might have seen Google automatically creating these question snippets on the search page, and upon expanding them, they give you a link to one of the relevant blogs. So, structure your blog headings in a way that asks a question so Google can crawl that section and show them up in the order.
6. All images should have alt (with keyword captions) and low size for better load times, load time affects SEO heavily. Site loading Speed is more important than most SEOs realize.
7. To get backlinks, usually we post the same blog to dev.to other relevant blog sites like hashnode or Medium and set up canonical links back to the main company blog page. This helps too.
8. The URL slug for each blog plays a very very important role in SEO ranking too, the close keyword, the better, like example.com/blog/cricket-vs-soccer. Include keywords in the URL.
9. Add keywords to the blog effectively — Means the keyword you are targeting must be repeated at least 5 times in the blog.
10. Increase Internal linking: Link other published blog in the blog, so they create a closed loop and helps in SEO.
11. The blog language should not be way too filled with technical jargon, simple explanations work best for more traffic.
12. Average length of a paragraph must be 3–4 lines. Long paragraphs are not appealing.
13. Date field mentioned in the blog should to too old, keep updating them. Max 2yrs old blogs do not get affected.
14. Avoid SEO gurus. Google values more quality of content.
15. Bullet points, tables, and quotes make a blog engaging, according to a Google blog I read sometime back.
16. There is a free tool called “answer the public”. Which has questions that people are asking, helps to make good headlines.
17. Do reverse Engineering using Cora. A tool.
18. Embed Youtube Video(s) on the blog to be found on Google’s video section.
19. Content should be targeted for a niche, and not generalized.
20. Update old content with new links.
21. Use more headers throughout the blog, a sweet number would be 10.
22. Voice Search Optimization — not that much important, but might be useful depending upon your targeted audience.
23. Focus on low competitive long-tail keywords at the beginning.
24. Follow the heading structure (H1, H2, H3, H4).
25. For every 200 words of copy (content) on a webpage, a given keyword should not appear more than once.
26. PAA i.e People Also Ask, is Google’s SERP feature that showcases answers to questions related to user’s search queries. From PAA pick the questions that are relevant to your article and answer them in your article. But, don’t stop here, as when you click on one of the questions, Google will add more questions after that.
27. Have a good cover photo. At least 1.
28. SEO takes time. It can take around 6 months too to rank in the top 3.
29. 20,000–30,000 words per month should be, 20 articles a month is a sweet spot.
30. Targeting Russia? Focus on Yandex.
Targeting China? Focus on Baidu.
31. Create an article that’s around 50% longer than the best article ranking on the keyword.
32. Use PageSpeed Insights to know the loading speed of your blog page.
33. Any given page should be possible to reach in no more than 3 clicks from the homepage.
34. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly: important from Google’s POV.
35. Activate lazy-loading of images.
36. Enable Gzip compression to allow your HTML, CSS, and JS files to load faster.
37. Avoid dates in URLs (but feel free to date me ;)).
Finding Authors
Instead, here are some of our favorite ways to source writers:
- Cult of Copy Job Board
- ProBlogger
- Headhunting on LinkedIn
- If you want to use UpWork, use it for headhunting (instead of posting a job ad)
- Medium.com
Tools:
- Google Search Console — to See If SEO Is Working
- Google Keyword Explorer
- Ahref / SEMrush
- Cora
- Screaming Frog
- RankMath/Yoast SEO
- Snov
- Surfer SEO
- ClusterAI
- Hemingwa
Yeah, that’s all folks, I might update the list when I get to know more SEO stuff, till then keep blogging.
Drop me a Hi on Twitter and I’ll reply — https://twitter.com/zriyanshh
