A recent question in the forums was “what are the rules for blog SEO?” In this post, I am going to give you the five most important things you should be doing to maximise your blog SEO.

1. Use Yoast

Yeast SEO is a plugin that we provide for all Author Buzz blogs. If you run your own blog, you can install the Yoast the way you would any other. By selecting “add new” in your plugin section of the admin area.

Yoast will check that you are using paragraphs, good sentence structure, headings, and an appropriate repetition of your keyword.

If nothing else, Yoast will guide you towards writing better quality content. Good content being the king of SEO, this can only be helpful.

2. Write for your audience

Write for your audience is the first advice that Sprout Social suggests in its list of seven SEO blogging tips. This is excellent advice.

Content was, is, and probably always will be king. Writing content that is good for your readers will always be a solid SEO strategy.

3. Build for speed

If you activate all the possible plugins and use a heavy theme with loads and loads of widgets added, your blog will slow to a crawl.

Slow sites are bad for readers and rank poorly with Google too.

Instead, chose the bare minimum of plugins that you need and the least widgets that help readers navigate your site. A lean and fast blog will generally do better than a bloated and slow one.

4. Link out to helpful resources

Don’t be afraid to link out to helpful or interesting pages. Like we did on that second point. The SEO tips in that list are worth paying attention to.

Here is another list of SEO tips that might be worth your time.

5. Pick a good permalink structure

How you design your permalinks says a lot about your blog to search engines. Which means link structure is an important aspect of SEO.

If you post mainly evergreen content (stuff that stays relevant for a very long time), you may wish to use a category and title approach. On the other hand, if your blog is mostly news and current affairs, a date-based structure.

I’ve gone into detail about URL structures in another post, so I will not repeat myself here.

Over to you

What SEO tips for bloggers would you add to this list? Let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.