First of all, this is the first blog of the year 2016!
Happy new year everyone! I hope you had a good break for xmas and new year.
Now, let’s get back to work and talk a bit about SEO. I have another big thanks for all of you who are visiting my blog. Recently I reached the milestone of 500 visitors on the last month. I must say it’s good for motivation!
Noticing an increase in my audience, I’ve been checking quite often my most popular articles and the keywords used to access to them.
Here are few easy and very general tips about SEO.
Mobile version
As you might know, Google pays now a lot of attention to see if your website is responsive or not. By responsive, they mean nicely display on mobile.
If your website isn’t, it’s more likely that you end up being deindexed or at least not showing up in the top results (let’s call it “deranked”).
Keywords
Well another one which is probably the hardest one. Keywords. My top 2 articles are this one about how to prevent a form submit with AngularJS and this one about why am I getting an empty value in my select tag, still with AngularJS
These two articles are fairly simple but generate a lot of traffic with searches like “angular prevent form submit” or “angularjs select default value”. I’m actually on the first page for these searches.
So based on these pages, I would say that it’s important to always specify what you are talking about inside your article. Like for this article, it’s all about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). And then don’t hesitate to use other keywords like “Search Engines” or “Google Robots” which might be used by some users but still relate to your topic. I know it sounds stupid, but sometimes you can write lines and lines of text without mentionning the main purpose of this text.
External links
If you can, try to always add some external links. The web is made of connections between websites. Don’t keep your sources for you, share them.
I have read a long time ago that Google would be more inclined to top result a page with external links than one with no links or only internal links.
Tools
Last but not least, check your SEO tools everyday or so. Of course there is the world famous Google Analytics to check your traffic, etc., but I highly recommend to use the “Google webmaster tools” in completion of it. So you can get to know which keywords/articles are a success. How often/Where do you show up in Google results, etc.
Host on a famous domain
I’ve read a few months ago that Google might “boost” you if your blog is hosted on a famous domain. As I said earlier, it takes time to get Google trust and it might be easier if your blog is using a subdomain of wordpress.com or like mine, github.io
Keep your blog active
Also I noticed, it’s important to keep some activity on your blog. And the more popular you get, the more Google trusts you and is likely to “top result” you.
At the beginning of your blog, I would suggest to post at least every two weeks. Then once, you start to get few visitors, you can like I do, switch to a more relaxed pace. I try to post every month. It’s good to keep the Google bots visiting your site.
Don’t hesitate to post your sitemap.xml on Google webmaster tools after you just updated it. Yes, sitemaps are really important. But nowadays, most of the blogging systems populate one automatically.
Good luck with your blog/website. SEO is hard work and it takes quite a long time to take effect. NEVER GIVE UP! :)