4 Simple SEO Hacks For Newbie Bloggers

If you want to bring lots of natural, organic traffic to your blog, it's important to get to grips with the basics of search engine optimisation (or SEO for short.) 

Quite often it can make or break a blog's views as without good SEO your little blog will go unseen in the vast sea of the internet. Luckily for you, newbie blogger, your SEO can be improved in a matter of minutes with these four simple hacks.

1. Change your URL/Permalink

It seems obvious, but changing your post's URL is something which often goes forgotten. It's so important to edit this little bit of blog code, especially if you have a long post title. 

Good tips for a post URL are to include key words (for this post I chose 'blogging', 'seo' and 'hacks') keeping it all in lowercase letters, and using a hyphen instead of spaces to increase visibility in search engines.

2. Write a search description

It may have other valuable SEO uses, but to me the search description is all about optimising your posts to be shared on social media. When you share a post to Facebook, the information pulled through in the post 'preview' is whatever you write in your search description, so it's important to make it as reader-friendly as possible.

Your search description is an opportunity to create a short and punchy selling point for your post, so spend time writing and -re-writing it until you think it is perfect. It should encourage and intrigue people enough to click on your blog in a single sentence, without giving too much of the post's content away.

3. Link your posts

A great way to up your SEO is by interlinking your own posts. In regular speak, this means hyperlinking from your current post to a previous one. This not only drives traffic back to an older post, which may have become buried in your archives for some time, but also decrease bounce rate (when a reader clicks on one article, but doesn't stay on your blog.)

It's really simple to link your blog posts as long as you keep the links relevant. For example,  if you've just started your blog and are looking for some more help and information, why not check out my post on 6 Tips For Beautiful Blog Photos?

You can also link your posts by using a 'related posts' widget on your blog. These are created using the labels feature in blogger, which brings me to the next blogging SEO hack.

4. Label your posts

I cannot stress enough just how important labels are, not just for SEO purposes, but also for keeping your blog organised into categories for different types of posts. 

When it comes to labelling your posts, it's best to keep to three or four 'main' labels (I use 'Beauty', 'Lifestyle' and 'Blogging' for mine) and then secondary labels which further describe the content of your posts. I normally use brand names for these, so I can make sure my LUSH, Benefit and Too Faced posts all link to each other in my related posts.

By labelling your posts right from the start, it makes it incredibly easy for you to create a header of categories at the top of your blog's homepage.

One last bonus tip? 

Leave your blog link in a comment below to direct traffic from my blog back to yours!