How to Improve your Blog’s SEO & Social Media Reach

For those of you who are bloggers, learning how to improve your blog’s SEO and social media reach can be a crucial part of our blogging success. If you have been blogging for a while, it’s probably a good idea to go in and update your posts to make sure your site is in tip top shape for search engines & social media sharing. You can also increase pageviews to some of your older, but still awesome content with these techniques. If you are a brand new blogger who is trying to figure out how to get started, these tips can help you get off to a great start with SEO & increasing your social media reach.

1. Make sure your posts are all categorized correctly and have relevant tags added. This helps with SEO, helps your readers find related content and if you use a related posts plugin it will help it pull posts that are actually related. Keep your categories simple and limited (depending on your niche you should have around 10-30 categories, the fewer the better though) and then use tags to deeper categorize your posts.

2. Make sure your posts have a quality image attached that is SEO optimized. Make your images more efficient and ready for sharing on social media by adding text with the name of the post as the title and on the image itself &  your website / watermark.  Check out this article from Social Media Examiner about how to create Pinworthy Images.

ALSO – make sure you make your images SEO optimized by filling in the title and alt information in the html description for the image that includes the title of the post and with relevant keywords. When you include the title attribute, Pinterest will show whatever you put as the title when someone goes to pin the image and search engines bots will also index the image based on what you include in the title attribute.  The alt attribute tells search engines what the image is as well as they can’t “see” the image, but they can “read” the title & the alt attributes (alt means alternate description). Also if your server isn’t showing the image for whatever reason, the alt description will show up so the reader will know what the image was supposed to be.

3. Check for broken links and fix them.  Use this Broken Link Checker site to search your site for broken links. Also look at your crawl errors in Google Webmaster Tools to see what pages or links Google cannot crawl and work on fixing those. It can take a while to fix all the broken links, but this will help your page rank.

4. Make sure your monetized links are all nofollow.  Per Google’s Policy, all paid links need to be marked as nofollow.  This means any links for affiliate offers, paid posts, sponsored posts, advertisements or anything you made money from or could make $ from if someone clicks it. To do this, just go to the HTML editor and after the link, add rel=”nofollow”  For instance-  <a href=”http://samplelinkhere.com” rel=”nofollow”>  This tells the search engine bots that this link is paid link so they know to index it correctly.

5. Update the SEO for your posts, make sure your title is SEO friendly, you have a good meta description filled in and the appropriate keywords. Remember your posts should have at least 200 words to be considered quality content and indexed by Google.  If you have posts that are less than 200 words or low quality (like group giveaway posts), you should noindex them. (On your post editor there should be an option in the SEO settings at the bottom to noindex the post).  Only do this for low quality posts that you can’t improve.  If you can re-write the post, add more solid content to it and make it quality, then do that instead.

Be sure to rebuild your sitemap / resubmit your blog when you finish updating all the SEO in your posts if you don’t have a plugin installed that automatically does that. Check SEOMoz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO and all the SEO Articles on Problogger for SEO tips if you are not really sure what SEO is.

Also be sure to add links to relevant posts on your blog on the same or similar topics. This will help increase your pageviews and decrease your bounce rate by keeping visitors on your site and clicking to see more of your great content!

7. Find your most popular or favorite posts from the past and begin sharing or re-sharing them on your social media channels. You can also recycle posts on relevant topics. For instance, did you post some stellar Valentine’s Day crafts or recipes last year? Now would be a great time to re-share them. Think about this throughout the year and re-share related content from past years for events, holidays or any current hot topics.

8. Repurpose your content on social media. Use the content from your blog posts to create Reels, Stories, regular posts, quote images, carousels and other posts.   You can link to your blog or the post itself to drive readers to your older posts. Your followers may enjoy taking a look back at your older posts too and you will build credibility with newer readers too. Obviously, this needs to be an evergreen post and you will want to be sure you are adding in new content regularly too. If you take the time, you can probably come up with a dozen or more pieces of content for social media from EVERY blog post!

9. Turn your blog posts into videos and start a YouTube channel. Your blog content makes great content for a Youtube channel in your niche! You can take you content and create keyword-rich content for your own Youtube channel to get followers from another platform. They may not ever visit your blog, but the content you write on your blog will be doing double duty and you’ll be working smarter not harder by using content you’ve already created for your Youtube audience.

10. Use FB’s new Meta Business Suite or other Post Planning apps to schedule your old posts to be published to your social media channels.  Mix in some of your older content with the newer content to keep a consistent flow of traffic to your site. Scheduling them out a few months ahead of time will help you work smarter, not harder.  Many professional bloggers automate up to 80% of their social media sharing. Remember though that FB doesn’t like a lot of external links (links that lead people off FB) in their posts or for you to tell people to click a link or visit your site, so put the link in the comments or add “see link in bio” to the end of your post and make sure you have your website link in your profile / bio.

IMPORTANT INFO: I have had several questions and I wanted to clarify. When referring to resharing content, I do not mean actually re-posting the content on your blog as a new post.  This would create duplicate content which is not good for SEO or Page Rank. Also, depending on your permalink structure, just changing the date for the post to republish could cause a broken link, which again is not good.  If your permalink structure only has the post name in it, then you would be okay to change the date and republish, otherwise you should not do that. I am mainly referring to re-sharing on your social media outlets, link ups and networking groups.

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