Google considers many factors while deciding upon whether a blog is relevant to a particular search query or not, and how it should rank in SERPs. First of all, it checks for the relevancy of your content. It then checks for any authoritative links that connect to your blog. Moreover, Google has confirmed that the third most important factor is RankBrain after content and links. So, you need to have a blog that succeeds to fulfill all these examinations by Google if you want it to rank higher on SERPs.
There are many SEO best practices that you must consider while setting up a new blog but, this blog speaks about some of the most important ones. For more information and understanding in detail, you can get in touch with a company that offers the best SEO services in Bangalore, who will take care of all your SEO practices to help your blog rank higher in SERPs. Meanwhile, here you can learn a few techniques that you can apply to optimize your blog.
Keyword research
One important element of good quality content is the inclusion of appropriate keywords. But, how would you know which keywords are ‘appropriate’? For this, you need to do a research and understand which words your customers may use to search for a product/service that relates to your business. Along with keywords, you must also include long-tail keyword phrases that can be specific to the particular kind of product/service you are offering. For example, instead of using an umbrella keyword like jewellery, you may include a specific phrase like ‘women’s gold precious jewellery’. This will keep you away from the competition between other businesses that deal with artificial or fashion jewellery.
Title tag and meta description
Title tag and meta description are very important for every page. A title tag outlines in a concise 70 character limit what the page is about. Include relevant keywords and your business/brand name in your title tag to help the page to rank higher in SERPs. Meta description too outlines what the page is about but, in greater detail. This is the description that will lead your visitors to click on your page, so make sure to fill it in a way that it attracts the visitors.
URL structure
It is very important to structure your URL in a way that the search engine can understand. Having unnecessary characters like question marks, punctuation marks and numbers will only make it hard for the search engine to crawl and index your site. Avoid using such URLs that do not let the search engine and visitors know what the site is about unless they land on the site. Be very clear and use the best descriptive words in your URL.
XML sitemap
XML sitemap are files that list URLs of the site along with other data like the last modification date, frequency of modifications, etc. This helps Google to intelligently crawl the site i.e. crawling only those pages that need to be refreshed or added in their database. This minimizes traffic on the servers, thus using less data bandwidth and lowering costs. So, when you generate a sitemap, the changes will be indexed faster. It is also being predicted that sitemaps will soon become a standard way of submitting a site to search engines and its importance will only continue to increase.