As I've already preempted in this blog post last Saturday (about 6 ways how to kick off search engine optimisation on your blog) I ain't no SEO genius. I know a few bits and bobs here and there and I'm learning every day but that kind of knowledge doesn't compare to what a real professional from the industry with years of experience at search engine optimisation knows. That's why I've asked Kerri Katz from Ingenuity Digital to answer a few hot SEO blog questions for you.
🔝 Who's Kerri Katz?
Kerri is from South Africa and has been living in the UK for the past few years. After graduating with a degree in Economics, she decided to move into Digital Marketing as this new, exciting, fast paced industry seemed like a perfect fit. She went on to get a Postgraduate Diploma in Digital Marketing from the Digital Marketing Institute in Ireland. From there, she found herself working at Ingenuity Digital, one of the fastest growing Digital Marketing agencies in the North of England. In her time at ID, she has worked in outreach and PR as well as her current, more technical role as an SEO Analyst.And what does Kerri think about SEO & blogging?
🎙 If there was one thing that you would advise every blogger to do RIGHT NOW to improve their blog SEO, what would that be?
💬 Use a site crawl tool such as SEOBook or IIS Search Engine Optimisation Toolkit to do a technical audit. Even if your technical knowledge is limited, small fixes can make big differences to your rankings and therefore your traffic. Do some keyword research! The keyword phrases that you might use in your post URLs, headings, meta data and content may not be what people are searching for. Make sure that you optimize your posts using the keyword phrases that can attract traffic to your site. Often, long tail keyword phrases with lower search volumes, will be a better focus for smaller blogs.🎙 What's the most common mistake you see bloggers make when it comes to SEO?
💬 Write what people want to read, not what you want to write.🎙 And how can we avoid that?
💬 Do some research before you plan your monthly posts. There are a lot of tools out there that can help you to find out what people are searching for, such as Google Trends, Answer the Public and Buzzsumo. Then, do your keyword research to make sure you are using the same phrases in your writing that people are using in their searches. This will increase your ranking for those phrases and help readers to find your posts through search engines.🎙 How can I make big bloggers or websites link to my small blog so that I can get high quality backlinks? Can I just comment on their blogs & link back to mine?
💬 Putting your own link in the comment section of other blog posts will likely see them removed by the modifier. These are not natural links and not the best way to get your site linked to by other sites. Outreach is tough but vital to improve your SEO. I would suggest writing good quality content, regularly and developing an attractive and trustworthy site. From there, you should contact sites that you believe may want to share one of your articles with their readers and send them personal outreach emails. Just remember, they have no reason to link to you, unless it benefits them or their readers.🎙 What are header tags, how important are they and do I have to use them?
💬 They are very important and you absolutely need to use them. Header tags are html code for headings on your page. The main heading, being the H1 tag and further sub-heading being H2, H3, H4 tags and so on. The H1 tag is the most important one for SEO and the one that you need to optimize. Ideally you would like your H1 tag to contain the highest search volume keywords related to your article. Search Engines will consider your H1 tag as an indicator of the subject of your page when crawling the site and rank you accordingly. Make sure every page on your site has a relevant and unique H1 tag.
Thank you Kerri for such great in-depth answers!
I hope you've found this blog post helpful and if so then please do share it with your blogger friends!
Sharing is caring and all that!
And if you want a whole blog post on any of the topics that Kerri has mentioned leave it in the comments below please!
