SEO for Bloggers in 2021

With a day job in SEO, posting bloggers guides is something I’d done a few times in the past but this is my first post on SEO for bloggers in 2021. I wanted to talk about topics I haven’t covered before as well as what I think will be important this year.

Relevancy

It’s easy to get caught up in keywords and headings without thinking about what search query your content is answering. If you post blogs that aren’t relevant to online searches, there’s no point trying to optimise for anything.

What can you do about it?

Think about the basics of SEO as this: what are people searching for and how can you content answer that query? There will always be posts like favourites and empties that are still valuable to your blog audience but don’t necessarily have SEO value though.

Tags and categories

The structure of your site is important too, and something that can often make things messy for bloggers are the tags and categories we create. Every time you add a new tag to your post, it automatically has a URL generated for it like https://beautysirenblog.com/tag/beauty-blog/. These pages can then be found by search engines, which means there may be lots of low quality pages on your site that aren’t offering any value to the user.

What can you about it?

If you have the Yoast plugin installed on your site and you’re comfortable playing with the settings, you can use the search appearance section to set tag archives and/or category pages to noindex to discourage search engines from finding them. If not, my advice would be to go easy on the tags and categories and only create what you really need to organise your content. Don’t try to use tags like they’re keywords and assume that will help your ranking efforts because the opposite might be true.

Internal linking

If you’ve gone to the effort of putting in the research, writing the best content on your chosen topic and executing onpage strategies, don’t let your efforts go to waste by ignoring internal linking. Internal links between your pages help users navigate your site and helps Google to find and index your pages.

What can you do about it?

When you write a new post, a lot of bloggers know to add in links to existing relevant posts on your site. What you can do to take this one step further is go back and update older content to include a link to your newly published piece.

I hope these few points helped for your blogging SEO efforts in 2021. Leave me a comment if you have any specific questions or want me to cover anything else.