5 SEO tips to make sure your blog gets found on google

SEO is a big topic for every small and big business owner. Either you are a photographer or you run your own cupcake store you want to make sure people will find you on google. Because the first thing everybody does when searching for a shop, a service, a vendor, a dress, a product, a location, a vacation, some food, or drinks or just a book is heading over to the four colored search engine and type what they are searching for. To make sure that you are the first answer that comes up in the list of million search engine results there are many different strategies and to get you started somewhere to be found instead of lost on page 1 468 here are my top 5 tips to get found on google (don’t be afraid this won’t be very techie).

1.Use permalinks

Your default setting of your wordpress blog will name your permalinks just random numbers. The permalink to this post for example is www.jenniferhejna.com/5-seo-tips-to-make-sure-your-blog-gets-found-on-google but somehow in the default settings in wordpress it could be named www.jenniferhejna.com/12345 and you want to make sure it has a proper name and no number or date as a title. To change this you just simply go to „Settings“ – „Permalinks“ and change it to post name.

2.Use good post titles

The post title is very important as it will now define your post permalink (if you read tip #1) and it would be your meta title as well if you don’t change that one specifically. If you don’t want to worry what a meta title is and you just want to be sure you are doing it well then stop using post titles like: „Love can conquer everything, Mary and Josh got hitched“ you should name your posts „Summer garden wedding in Amsterdam | Mary and Josh“ – like this couples who would search for a garden wedding in Amsterdam are more likely to find you.

3. Post regularly

Search engines like to show fresh content and the more you show and update your blog the more likely it is for google to find your posts. When your last posts dates back to 2011 you shouldn’t be surprised that your google ranking isn’t that good. If you don’t have content to post each day or a few times a week then just post once a week or once every two weeks, just make sure you update your blog regularly.

4. Name your images

Google image search is a big thing, don’t underestimate it. But google will only be able to find your images if you name them accordingly (that sound simple doesn’t it?). Instead of uploading an image to your blog with the name „IMG_12345.jpg“ rename your image to „summer_garden_wedding_in_amsterdam_by_photographer_John_Smith_1.jpg“ and you will be surprised how easily your images will appear in the image search.

5. Use a SEO plugin

To make it all easy and not to techie use a plugin that helps you improve your SEO on each and every page of your blog and of your blog posts. I prefer SEO by Yoast. Your meta title is the title that shows up in blue on the google search page and your meta description is the text underneath. Make sure you fill in these information for each blogpost.  The plugin makes it so easy and it shows you the meta title and meta description of each and every post and page underneath your content area.

Did you already implement some of the tips above? What other tricks are you using to get found on google (there are like 100 more things you could do to be better found). What helped you most?