BBP 9: Kiss SEO Stress Goodbye With These 5 Quick Tips
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Shownotes
Welcome to the Blogger Breakthrough Podcast, I’m your host, Liz Stapleton from ElizabethStapleton.com and founder of the Blogger Breakthrough Summit. In today’s episode we’re going to be talking about some easy things you can do to help with your blog’s search engine optimization.
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Okay, so lets dive right into the tips because traffic from search engines, like Google, are considered the holy grail of referrals. But there are some things that bloggers do that can hurt their SEO. There are also some really simple things bloggers can do to help their SEO.
First, Check Your SEO Plugin Settings
Personally, I use Yoast SEO. It’s a great plugin and I think a lot of bloggers are told to use it without much detail on why or what settings they should check.
While most people use the Yoast SEO widget when creating or editing a post, there are some general settings you should make sure to look at. You can find them by selecting “Search Appearance”
I would make sure to pay particular attention to the Content Types, some other plugins you use may be showing up, back when I was using Thrive Leads I had no idea that random pop ups were showing up when people searched for my site my site.
The other piece you want to pay attention too under search appearance is the Media settings, this includes your graphics but also any PDFs you may have uploaded – like say a freebie
Which brings me to my next tip…
Make Sure Your Freebies Aren’t Free on Google
If someone can find your freebie on Google they don’t need to join your email list. For a quick way to make sure your freebies aren’t search able, if you choose to have the rest of your media searchable….
In the media section on your website search for pdf or whatever file type your Freebie is. Then go into each one and select “edit more details”, there you’ll see the yoast settings for that particular media file, under the “Advanced” dropdown menu select “No” where is says, “Allow search engines to show this Media in search results?”
If people access the freebie from a special download page you’ve created, you’ll also want to go into the yoast settings of those pages and make sure they aren’t searchable on Google either.
Get Rid of Dates in Your Permalinks
When you start a WordPress site your permalink settings usually default to include the “day and name” but including the day in the permalink is not great for search engine optimization.
But before you go changing it, if you’ve been using that default and plan to change it, likely to the “post name” option, then know you will need to forward all your old URLs to the new URL.
You’ll likely want to use a plugin like Redirect to do this, but I would highly recommend hiring this out so that you don’t end up with a bunch of dead links everywhere.
Use Link Juice Correctly
Outbound links (links to sites other than your own) have settings you need to be aware of as well.
There may be times when you don’t want to pass along your “SEO juice” to other sites just in general. Then there are times when you absolutely should not. In those cases, you need the outbound link to be classified as “no-follow”.
You should be using “no-follow” classification on any link that is paid, that includes links in sponsored content as well as affiliate links. The folks at iMarkInteractive wrote a great explanation of when to use no-follow and how to set a link as “no-follow”.
Share Your Authority
In an update to their algorithm in 2018, Google started placing more emphasis on EAT = expertise, authority, trustworthiness.
The better your EAT score, the better your chances of ranking. This means you need to make sure that your site demonstrates your authority and expertise.
A few easy ways to do this is through your about page and your bio. So make sure they’re good and if they don’t currently showcase your expertise go back and edit them.
Final Thoughts
Even if you’re a new blogger, these 5 things are easy to do to help you with your site’s SEO.
- Review your settings in the Yoast SEO Plugin
- Make sure your freebies aren’t searchable in search engines
- Take dates out of your permalink structure
- Use nofollow links appropriately
- Showcase your authority and trustworthiness throughout your site
Implementing all of these things should only take maybe an hour of your time and could pay off big time in the long run.
Once again, thanks for joining me today, I hope you are able to start knocking SEO out of the park. If you enjoyed this episode – please take a moment to leave a review on iTunes.
