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Blog Spring Cleaning: Week 2 Improve Your Site’s SEO

Byrobbi hess

Guest post by Kimberly Gauthier, Keep the Tail Wagging

Editor’s Note: In part one of this series we asked you to request honest, constructive feedback on your blog. You can read that post here.

We may start our pet blog to write about our dog, cat, ferret, but it doesn’t take long before we’re introduced to Blog the Change shutterstock_112781614and we find that we are in a unique position to make a difference.  If you have any ambition of your message reaching the masses and effecting change, you must add SEO (search engine optimization) to your blogging repertoire.

SEO seems like a scary task to take on, which is probably why so many of us leave it alone.  There are six easy things you can start doing today to improve your blog’s SEO going forward.

  1. Check for broken links.  If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, there’s a plug-in for this – Broken Link Checker.  For everyone else, you can use a the free site Broken Link Check.
  2. Use keywords and key phrases.  Think about what people are searching for and try and incorporate those keywords into your blog title and post.  When I write about raw dog food, I try and use that key phrase a couple of times in the post to show Google what the article is about.
  3. Add keywords to the alt tags of your images.  When you add images to your blog posts, add the keywords for your post to those images.  For example, I write a lot about our dogs’ joint pain, so when I add images, I will add “joint pain in dogs” to the description.
  4. Add backlinks.  When I write about a topic I’ve visited in the past, I’ll link back to the article within the blog post.  Recently, I learned to add a hyperlink to the keywords.  For example, when I write about raw dog food, I hyperlink the key phrase to a past post on same topic OR to the category.
  5. Post regularly.  Now this shouldn’t be a problem for pet bloggers, because posting is what we do.  But there are times when we need a break.  You can schedule posts in advance or request guest bloggers from the BlogPaws community for the period when you’re going to be away.
  6. Invest $2.99.  I recently downloaded SEO Step-by-Step and had a blast reviewing my blog’s SEO.  This is a great book for beginners and those who would like a brush up on their SEO.

It’s tempting to go back and try and add SEO to the past year’s blog posts and if you started your blog last month, that’s do-able.  But if you’ve been at this for a while, just start today (or tomorrow).

If you have any questions or ideas, definitely reach out to the BlogPaws community so that we can all learn together.

Happy Spring Cleaning!

Next week we talk about: What are your blogging goals?

(Photo: Shutterstock: Ferret and orange bag)

 

 

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