Top 5 Must Do SEO Things Before Publishing Your Articles

Today Search Engine Optimization is the life of every blog or website and there are thousands of articles written on this topic alone. SEO techniques are changing by the time as search engines have become more intelligent by their algorithm updates overtime. Apart from other SEO things we try to do, there are some basic, simple, effective and must do SEO things which did not change by the time. Performing these tasks is not compulsory for anyone to get the articles ranked in search engines but compulsory to get the higher rankings with increased Click Through Rate from Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Only ranking in the first page of Big G will not get you high volume of traffic because it depends solely on the title and description of your article/page which increases the CTR. If it does not entice the reader enough, he is not going to click. So you need to take care of these things listed below.

1) Optimized Eye Catchy Title

Title of a post plays the most important role in SERPs and generates the CTR (Click Through Rate). It doesn't matter that your article got ranked in first page of Google SERPs if it does not attract visitors and make them click. Believe me, it happens and the pages ranked below/above which are having the eye catchy post title reap the juice even if you have written so good in-depth and informative article, it is not shown in the search results, it is only the title and description what matters. There will always be 9 other results on Google's first page along with your article so what makes your article different than others' and drive loads of traffic is the Title of The Article. So next time while crafting titles, think more than twice about it.

Let me give you an example of two results on Google SERPs for a search query "Horizontal Subscription Box":

1) "Horizontal Subscription Box Widget For Blogger"

2) "Stylish Horizontal Subscription Box Widget For Blogger"

Above between these two results, which one seems to be eye catchy? Of-course 1st result is tend to generate more clicks as it sounds more delicious because of "Stylish". Always keep in mind while you have to craft the title of your article that you need to keep title short, keywords in title and not only set of keywords but overall an eye catchy title. See the image below.

2) URL Optimization

URL can be and must be optimized as search engines pay attention to URLs, mostly Google. It is easy for the users of Blogger.com platform because of blogger's Permalink feature. It was introduced in 2012 but only a few bloggers use this feature because they don't know what it is meant to be or why to edit URL yourself when blogger does it automatically and they don't give it a single try. Blogger's Permalink feature is to edit the post's URL. When you enter the title of a new post, blogger automatically generates the post URL but it may not include the main keywords of your post because there are only first 30 characters picked from the title so better way is to edit the Permalink manually (can be found on right side in blogger post editor under the Post Settings) and make it simple, keywords optimized and as short as you can.

example: Title "How To Use FontAwesome Icons In Blogger Template"

Blogger Will Generate The URL Automatically: http://www.example.com/2014/01/How-To-Use-FontAwesome-Icons.html

As you can see the the URL above generated by blogger automatically is missing some of our main keywords "Blogger Template" so the URL is not as relevant as the post title and we can make it relevant by editing in Permalink: http://www.example.com/2014/01/How-To-Use-FontAwesome-Icons-Blogger-Template.html

By editing the URL permalink above, I added "Blogger-Template" keyword which makes sense, is short and perfect according to the title of the post because this post tells about using Font Awesome icons in Blogger.

3) Your Blog Images Can Do More

Most of the bloggers whether newbies or pro, use images in the articles as they play important role in understanding what post is all about in one go and let your readers read your articles thoroughly because images also increase the interest, excitement and creativity. But there is another way by which the images of your blog can bring extra visitors to your blog and that is possible with image alt attribute. Daily thousands of search queries performed in Google to search images and Alt attribute helps Google to index your images and display in SERPs. So next time do not forget to use the alt attribute which is the short description of the image using alt tag as shown below:

example: 

<img alt="SEO Tips" src='http://www.example.com/images/SEO.png'/>

Use some keywords in alt tag so that Google will rank and display it accordingly.

4) Interlinking To Older Posts

Interlinking means to link back from a post to another older posts of your blog. This is most important task every blogger must practice as it has delicious benefits. When you write an article, it is possible that it contains the bunch of other keywords on which you have already written some articles so on the same time you have the opportunity to link back to those older posts from these words. When you do that on your blog, it helps search engines to crawl your blog thoroughly and it works like as a sitemap of your blog and it also helps the readers to read the most relevant posts they might be interested which overall lowers the bounce rate and rapidly increases the page views many times. So make a habit of doing it regularly and your blog will gain more user engagement and increase the trust in the eyes of search engines.

5) Grammar Checking

When we start writing an article, usually we don't review the most common grammar mistakes manually and instead we hit the Auto Grammar Check Option in blog editor but let me tell you that they do not review your sentences or right words and instead they check for spellings. So along with that option, never forget to review your article manually. Give it a fresh look and read thoroughly and loudly by which you will get to know what makes sense or not then edit it as you think fits best.  You can use synonyms of the words which are breaking the flow of your article. Writing is an art and it can be learnt by the time but you have to put efforts.

Conclusion: If you have never been to these things then you are advised to rethink and use the aforesaid 5 must do SEO things before publishing your articles.

What do you think about these 5 must do seo things? Do they worth in the list? Did I leave anything in our must do list? What are some other things from the SEO point of view?