Today, I am going to tell you about the four most important aspects of a blog that determine your terms with search engines. These four things are URL, title, description and incoming links. Every webmaster must focus on these basic things while making efforts to optimize a blog or a website for search engines. URL is an acronym that stands for Uniform Resource Locator. As the name suggests, a URL is like an ID that is attached to everything available on World Wide Web. It could be a website, web page, blog post, image, video or any other kind of file. If you’re not a tech-savvy person and if you want to be in professional blogging, it is extremely important that you understand the structure and function of a URL.
Keywords
In terms of SEO, it is recommended that your post keywords appear as part of the post URL. Deciding URL (and title, description) of a post is an art. You need to be careful not to overdo anything and yet include keywords that people may be searching for. My advice of caution is that you should not mislead your readers through your URL, title or description. As I have already explained, it is considered a black hat technique.
Clarity and Length of URL
Although, the URL can be very long, it is recommended to have it as short as possible. Longer URLs are difficult to remember and also difficult to paste on other web pages. Very long URLs look very ugly. If your URLs are very long, I suggest that you make use of URL shortening services and use these shortened URLs for pasting on other blogs / social media. Title of your blog post is determined by what is written in TITLE tag. This text appears in the title bar of the browser window and also search engines use it as link in search engine result pages (SERPs) Just like URL, deciding title of a blog post or web page is also something that should be done with care. People make several common mistake while writing title tag. Blogging platforms like WordPress allow you to use post title as part of permalink. I personally use and recommend this structure of permalink because it brings in keyword consistency between URL and Title. Now you may be thinking how long post title should be? Well, there is no hard-and-fast limit but ideal length of a title should not be more than 60 characters. At present Google shows only up to 60 characters in SERPs. If the title is longer than 60 characters, Google puts ellipses and curtails the title. Needless to say, title of post should also contain your post keywords. Also, title must not begin with your blog’s name. If you want to put blog name in the title, it should come in the end. Ideally the title of the post should come first in the overall title. Most of the bloggers act lazy and don’t understand what they are losing by not including description with each of of their posts. Description of a post also appears in SERPs. Google and other search engines give you negative marks if you ignore putting description in place. META description tag controls the description of a post. If we go by Google’s current practice, a description should not be more than 156 characters. I recommend that you hand-craft description for every blog post. Write it in a way so that you summarize the entire post and also include keywords. From description, your reader should get a fair idea on what she can expect from reading your post. If you don’t write a description, for SERPs Google picks up a chunk of text from your post where the searched keyword appears. This is the currency of web. Your blog or website is only as rich as the number of incoming links it possess. Google uses PageRank algorithm (other search engines also use similar methods) to assess the quality of a website. Number of incoming links is the most important among criteria that determine your PageRank. You should write quality material so that other people share it along with your blog’s link. The more incoming links you have, the higher you’ll rank in Google and thus you’ll have higher traffic. I will again warn against using dirty techniques for gathering incoming links. Also, don’t think that all the incoming links are good. If rouge websites (like link farms) are linking to your website -you should worry about it and disown such links. Remember, having bad neighbors give a bad reputation to you also! So, these were the four most important things that you must care for while blogging and optimization. It goes without saying that eventually success comes mainly because of the quality of your work. But keeping these technicalities in mind will speed you up towards success. I hope this article was useful for you. Please feel free to ask in case you have any questions. I will be happy to try and help you. Thank you for using TechWelkin. Happy blogging!
