SEO Basics for your Blog

**** LAST UPDATED 26th APRIL 2014 ****

I don't proclaim to be an SEO expert or anything like that, but SEO is my day job, and I've been doing it for about two years - and in that time, I've picked up a few tips and tricks of best practice, or as we like to call it in the biz, being 'white hat' :)  This is part of a series of SEO type posts that I've been doing, the first two of which were 'Setting up a Google Analytics account' and 'Understanding Google Analytics'.

First off, a bit of an explanation of what SEO is.  SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, and to put it as simple as possible, it's about getting high up on that first page of a Google search without paying for it (or as high as possible at least!).  Ok, with me so far?  Great, I'll crack on!  I'll get to how to optimise your blog in a sec, first off a bit more about what 'White Hat' etc is.

Do tell me, what is White Hat?

In the industry there are three terms floated about, White Hat, Grey Hat and Black Hat - its fair to say, they're pretty much what they sound like.

• White Hat is being squeaky clean, not paying for links etc and doing everything Google dictates suggests.
• Grey Hat is a bit of a middle ground, you're doing most things right, with the odd sneaky trick.
• Black Hat is basically the dark side - using any means possible to get that top Google position whether that's buy buying all your links, spamming, whatever it takes goddam it!

I think most bloggers fall into White Hat/Grey Hat, it's the Black hats you want to be wary of! :)  Ok, now I'm going to give you some pointers on how to optimise your blog and blog posts.

The Rules! (they're more like guidelines really)

The first rule of SEO is... you don't tell anyone about it... kidding! I know, I know, this isn't fight club! Seriously though, there are some simple rules to bear in mind when you're writing a post.

• Content is King! Sounds cheesy and basically is - but good quality content will be like catnip for Google, make sure your content is relevant, good quality and not spammy.  So... I don't know, if a PR approaches your beauty blog with a guest post that's filled with hyperlinks to an oil refinery - it's not very relevant to your blog, or the site that it's being linked to.
• Relevancy - as I said above, keeping your posts relevant and pretty much key.  If all you blog about is cleansers, and suddenly you're blogging about cars, boats, drain covers and next door's cat every once in a while, Google may wonder what's going on.
• Post regularly - it's fine not to post every day, post as often as you like, but try to keep it regular, whether that's once a month or three times a week, keeping momentum is like tickling Google's belly, purrrrrr.

How to Optimise your posts (the bit you've been waiting for!)

After suffering through all that I'm sure you're keen to look at all the pictures and see some real ways to help your blog rank better with Google, so here we go.

Post Titles
This is kind of important.  Try to put the name of the product in the title, it helps Google work out what it's about and if it's relevant to what the customer/user/person has searched for.  So, here if I'd put 'some purple stuff you put on your cheeks' as the title, it may not rank as well ;)

Hook me up!
Linking relevant 'anchor text' (the words that you're linking off your site) with a relevant/appropriate link also helps Google work out who and what your post is for, just remember to mix things up a bit and vary the anchor text you use - keeps things looking natural :)

Here (the pic below), the first arrow (on the left) is pointing to the anchor text, which in this case is 'Flash Plum', the arrow underneath it is pointing to the checkbox for opening the post in a new window - this is good for keeping your readers on the article they're interested in, and allows them to continue reading another post in a new window, and the arrow on the right is where you need to paste the URL of where you want to take your reader.  So here, if they click on 'Flash Plum' they would expect to be taken to a place where they can buy it - hence the link to superdrug, which is where I bought this.

If this product was gifted to me to review, or if this post was sponsored, you should also hit the checkbox for 'Add 'rel=nofollow' attribute' which is right under the 'open in a new window' checkbox - this tells Google to ignore the link and that it's not a paid SEO link (which is against their guidelines).

Images, Images, Images!
Now, this is pretty important.  After you've added your image, left click on it so you get this little tool bar up, then click on properties.  (look at next image below!)

When you do that, you'll get this box up.  You should really fill in both these fields, although, the Title Text is optional but the ALT text is important.  The title text gives your picture a tooltip that will display over it, whereas the ALT text should be a meaningful description of the image, and will be read out by screen readers (pieces of software that read web pages for the blind).  So keeping ALT text as a good description of the picture is really important.

Content and Keywords
The first arrows are pointing to 'my thoughts' and the 'normal' field.  I always put paragraph headings as 'Minor Heading' from the 'normal' drop down - this is the equilivant to an <h2> tag, telling Google etc that it's a small heading - you generally only have 1 <h1> tag on a post/page which will be the main post heading, which will automatically be there by blogger.

Next up - making words bold!  This is useful mostly for emphasising relevant keywords that you want the reader to be drawn to, these don't need to be links or anything, just keywords relating to the post.

Keywords - it's good SEO practice to have the product/topic's keyword appear a good few times in a post (this is called keyword density).  Not too much that it looks unnatural, but you also want to get the point across of what you're talking about.  I've put circles around relevant keywords (blush and with the brand term 'maybelline).  This will help your SEO rank on Google too :)

(It's worth noting (I'm blowing my own trumpet here!) I rank on page 1, 5th position for the post this is based on (and at time of checking (August 2013), this SEO post ranks #1 for 'beauty blog SEO') :)  So proof that all this works :)

Meta Descriptions
This is the sentence you see under the URL when you do a google search - see the square below?  Well, that's my meta description.  You can amend yours by going into Settings > Search Preferences and edit the Description.  It should be about 155 characters (not dramatically less and definitely no more).  Include keywords that are relevant for your blog, but don't just spam keywords.  You'll see in mine I've included British beauty, Makeup blog, Makeup reviews - all keywords that people may type in to find my blog.  Again, make sure this is relevant.

EDIT 01/09/13: Note, that when you update your meta description, it can take a few days to show up on Google, just in case you're wondering why it hasn't updated yet :)

So there you have it, my tips and tricks for optimising your blog, there's literally masses and masses more detail that I could go into about this but we'd be here all day, and I'd have written war and peace! I hope it's been easy to follow and understand.  If you'd like to see any other posts on topics like this just leave a comment below and I'd be happy to put a post together :)

Page Speed (this section added 7th October 2013)
This can be a fairly significant ranking factor too, but the faster your blog loads, the more likely it is that your reader will stay and read more content (who wants to wait for 2 mins for a page to load?), and the better Google will rank your blog.  One of the biggest issues with blogs and page load times, and the easiest one to fix is around images.  I was guilty of this myself, letting blogger do the resizing for me.

If you're taking high quality photo's and uploading them straight to your blog, then Blogger is going to have to resize the images every time the page loads, and if you're a beauty blogger/fashion blogger, the chances are you'll have a photo-heavy blog.  So, do yourself a favour and edit your pics in image editing software first like PicMonkey and reduce the size to the size it needs to be on screen, there's no point in having it any bigger, it'll only slow your page down.

Useful Sites & Tools
SEOmoz - veritable guru's of SEO with useful guides and tools
Google Keyword tool - use it to search for local monthly search terms relating to a keyword such as 'beauty blog'
Google linking guidelines - are you white hat or black hat!?
Google SEO tips - their official tips!
Jayne from Jayne's Kitschen has also written a great post on it, from a broader angle :)

Acronyms
SEO - Search Engine Optimisation
SERPs - Search engine results page
RSS - really simple syndication
DA - Domain Authority
PA - Page Authority
PR - PageRank
There's not many more that would be relevant to blogging :)

This months big pixi3 advertisers are the lovely Laura from A Scottish Lass, Tasha from Belleza Kisses, Gem from Miss Makeup Magpie, Luchessa from Luchessa, Sally from The Human Mannequin - be sure to head over to check out their beautiful blogs <3

 

Understanding Google Analytics

*** THIS POST WAS LAST UPDATED 26th APRIL 2014 ***

So it's time for part 2 on Google Analytics, I wrote part one a few weeks ago on how to set up Google Analytics (you can find that here).  This post will focus on how to understand the stats that you will have accumulated over the last few weeks, what they mean and what you're ideally aiming for.

So to begin, go and log in to your Google Analytics account :)  Then hit the Reporting button at the top.

The first set of stats you'll see will be the Audience > Overview.  You'll see a graph with some stats underneath it, like this :)

The date range in the top right of your page will default to the previous 30 days, if you want to change it just click on the date range, then on the date you want it to start, then the day you want it to end, and hit apply.

(The above image is using my stats from April 2014 which uses the current terminology 'sessions' and 'users')

Google track all these stats in 2 ways.  One, by you adding their tracking code to your template and any existing posts, and by them then installing cookies on all your readers computers just to see if they've been before and are a returning reader etc.

Audience > Overview

Sessions - this is the amount of people that have visited your site in that date period, this will include if one person visits your site 20 times.  Not a unique statistic.

Users - this is the amount of unique individuals that visited so if you visited the site 20 times, this should show as 1 as you're just 1 person.  So this is really the more important of the 2 stats.  This is typically what brands/PRs etc will ask for.

Pageviews - so this is the amount of times any of your pages have been viewed in that timescale, so that could be one person viewing lots of pages, and lots of people viewing one page.

Pages / Vist - so a consolidation of the average amount of pages that people view each time they visit.

Average Visit Duration - the average amount of time people have spent on your site in that period. You'll find giveaways will affect this (reduce it), content that people aren't as keen on or maybe if people don't like the design of your site as much.

Bounce rate - this is an important one, a bounce rate is defined by someone visiting your site and how quickly they click off.  So the higher the bounce rate, generally the quicker people are leaving.  So many things can affect bounce rate.  For example mine was around 55% before I did my redesign, after that it quickly dropped by 10%!  Giveaways will affect bounce rate negatively too, as more people only visit to enter the giveaway then leave, mine has gone up 2% since launching my latest giveaway.  Ideally you're aiming for a nice low number :)  If you have your site set up so that they have to click 'read more' or something to read your full post, you may find you have a higher bounce rate as people will be clicking on a link very quickly after landing on your site.  It's also worth baring in mind, having extra links to click to read the content is a barrier and can discourage people from reading and interacting.  So just something to bare in mind. (Ignore my bounce rate stats in the image above - it's not being tracked correctly, before it broke it was around 55%)

% of New Sessions - this is the total amount of people that have visited you that haven't visited you before.  What constitutes as a new session could be that they're looking at your site from a different device, for example, lets say they looked at your blog from work, then came home and looked on the laptop or tablet, thats likely to pick up one of the visits as new.

Pie Chart - pretty self explanatory - the amount of returning readers vs the amount of new readers. Interestingly before I launched my recent giveaway I had more new readers than returning readers (around 55% new), now it's flipped and the other way around as people are often returning to complete the rafflecopter widget for their daily tweets :)

Acquisition

Next, head to Traffic Sources (via the navigation on the left in google analytics).  If you navigate to 'All Traffic' which is under 'Sources' it'll give you a list of which sites are your top referral sites.  You can enter names/terms in the search bar just above the results if you're looking for a specific referral.  For example, I advertise on different people's blogs, and I like to see how effective they are, like Sprinkle of Glitter's blog - I advertise there pretty much every month and usually one or two others.  To see how many clicks I had from Sprinkle of Glitter, I simply click on 'All referrals' and search the word 'glitter' (you can type the main url or just pick a keyword from it) to find all the referrals I'd had from her.  As you can see from the image below, if you add them all up I had 15 visits over the month I was advertised on there.

Ignore the 'paid' section, that only applies if you do google ads (PPC - pay per click) which none of us would do - for Traffic Sources I tend to stick to the 'all traffic' field, it tells me everything I need to know.

Behaviour/Site Content

Last thing I'm going to go through today is content (tab on the left). This is really useful because you can see very easily how your different blog posts perform, see which ones do well, how long people view them for etc.  If you go to Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages you can see the breakdown per page.  But my favourite bit of the Content area is the 'in-page analytics' bit at the bottom, that looks at pages on your site, and where people have clicked :)  It's really interesting to see if buttons are being clicked on and effective.  One tip is that if you have a button that you want people to click on and it's not working very well, try designing a new one and loading up that one, and seeing if it makes a difference, you can use google analytics then to see if it's had an effect :)

One last tip - on the left where all the menu's are like Acquisition and Behaviour, there's a Real Time tab, click on that then Overview - you can see who's on your site that minute, where abouts in the world they are, and what page they're looking at, I love looking at this when I've sent a tweet out or updated my facebook page, it's really interesting to see the effect it has :)

If you haven't set up analytics yet, here's my guide on how to do that.

Did you find this helpful?  

A day at Google London

Hey guys - so double post and this is a bit of a different one :)  Hope you like it!

WARNING: PICTURE HEAVY!!!

So today I went to the big smoke London to visit Google HQ today - they were doing an event called 'Learn with Google' aimed at people working in digital marketing.

During our first break we went to sit on the patio outside - they've got grass, hedge with a yummy cuppa joe coffee, luckily it was nice and sunny :)

Then at lunch... well we ate food, I tried to take pics but I was a bit late to the game - after we'd had sandwiches and sushi there wasn't much left to photograph, but here's pics of the remnants :)

I know what you're thinking, YUMMY!  Same as I did :)  After we'd had some food, and I'd taken pictures of said food, I had a little walk around and took some other pics of the floor, since it was so stunning :)  Here's those pics :)

The whole design to the place is fantastic, lots of different colours, textures, no expense spared :)  I love the croquet and the names in lights 'cafe royle' etc :)  It all feels very glitsy and glam - right up my alley :)  In fairness, where I work isn't a million miles away from that - we have foosball tables, TV's, colourful sofa's and a mini golf couse, but it's no Google ;)

When we left I took another 2 pics, London cabs because it's so London!  And a snippit of the Google offices, I love how colourful the buildings are :)

I had a great time, learnt a lot and loved how hospitable Google were - you can really see they all love working there which is lovely to see :)

Have you ever been?

Pixi3 out

xXx