It’s crazy to think that Google is around 20 years old. The search engine has been around for quite a long time and, with this, there have been changes to the algorithms as to how to calculate the organic ranking of websites and articles to go towards the goal of Google’s – to make the web user’s experience online better.

Making sure you perform search engine optimization on articles before you publish them is crucial to how much traffic your articles are likely to get. With this, here are some must dos for you to do when you are blogging in 2017, to make sure you utilize search engine traffic the most.

 

 

#1 Include an Image

Images are a necessity when blogging. From including a relevant image to your article, you have opened up your article to being processed by image search engines. With this, you will be surprised just how much traffic a new unique image can get from image search engines!

There are lots of ways to find new unique images to stick in your articles. You can always purchase the copyright of stock images from numerous websites. If you are feeling particularly skilled, you could always produce your own images.

 

 

#2 Use Headings when Blogging

Again, this is an absolute necessity. Headings are one of the ways Google and other search engines understand your content. The crawl robots will see a heading and give the heading more weight since it is likely the heading is best describing the content below it (such as it does in this article). From this, search engines will get a better idea what your content is about helping for the article to rank higher organically.

 

 

#3 Include Meta-Titles and Descriptions

Meta-titles and descriptions are ways of over-riding the title and description that appears for your article and website in search engine results. For example, you could be blogging about ‘How I managed to fix my car’ and have that as the title on your website. Automatically, this is also the meta-title for search engines to use, which is a bad idea since it has poor SEO. Therefore, you could change the meta-title to ‘How to fix a Ford Fiesta Mk2’s Engine’ to give your article some better SEO.

 

 

#4 500 Words Minimum

There was a time when blogging tended to hover around the 300 word mark, for an article, since a lot of bloggers found this was enough to provide the necessary SEO for the article and website.

However, there is not much you can talk about within 300 words and Google has seemingly clocked onto this. In general, the longer the article, the more indepth the article will go and the better it is for being indexed by Google. If you want a minimum word limit for good SEO, I would stick it roughly at 500 words, although I would almost certainly double that value to provide better SEO, like I do for PoemAnalysis.com where most articles are over 1,000+.