I promise this isn’t going to be a rehashing of other SEO tips posts, because I know we’re all pretty bored of seeing the same things on different numerical lists, with the order being the only thing changed. I’m bored of them too.

But there are some that you don’t see often at all, some that I’ve only really found out about recently and, well. Yo. Despite the fact I kinda want to rank first across all search engines, I thought I’d share. Because what sort of blogger would I be if I hoarded all the good stuff to myself.

If you knew these already, fab! If you’ve got any others leave them down below so I can start making changes. If these are completely new to you, never fear!

optimise your blog photos

as well as the obvious ‘rename because zero people are going to search ‘IMG_1903”, you should reduce the size of your blog images so that your website loads quickly and so search engines are happy. I’m not necessarily talking reduce the dimensions of your image, but the file size. Say you’ve got some beautiful holiday snaps that are a whopping 6GB each. And you upload even 5 of those to one post. That’s 30GB of images in one post.

30 gigs.

In one post.

Not to mention sidebar images, header images, social media buttons, widgets, other posts and their images if you don’t use a read more…

That’s a lot of load time.

The average person will wait about 6 seconds for your page to load before they get bored and tab out, and the slowest things to load are almost always images. So you’ll want to be reducing those file sizes. There are some fab programs out there that do it for you, and two of my favourites/most used are tinyPNG and compressor.io. I also have a desktop app called JPEGmini if I need to reduce twice. You want to aim to have the smallest file size possible without losing quality, so that your page loads faster.

With a smaller load time, you’ll be retaining more newer readers with your content, and your bounce rate should reduce to reflect this. Faster loading images are more likely to appear in the top spots of website image searches… so even though it’ll add some time to your post writing, it’s well worth it.

write longer posts 

ah, a picture is worth 1000 words. True, but longer content generally does better in the online world. Unless it’s tweets, facebook posts or G+ headlines, then it’s better to stay short and snappy. The ideal blog post length is about 1600 words, according to buffer, which takes about 7 minutes to read. Buffer also suggested if the post is image heavy it takes the written requirement down to about 1000 words. If you’re writing in an area that is very competitive, you might want to bump that up to 2000.

In all honesty, this kind of depends on the content – I wouldn’t expect a product review to be 1600words unless it was really in depth, but I would also feel shortchanged at a couple of sparse paragraphs. If I wanted to read the press release I would reread that email. It’s kind of proven that longer content generally invokes more of a reaction in a reader, considering they’re thinking about what they’re reading, and are therefore more likely to share – and social shares show that your content is worth knowing about, which helps your SEO.

google+ is actually great for social sharing

wait what g+ isn’t dead? Nope, it isn’t and Google does like to play favourites. Social status and SEO are not mutually exclusive, despite what some might still say, and content that is shared is content that is noticed. And SEO is all about getting noticed. If you share a post on G+ and it gets a rush of +1’s, you’re showing the internet that ‘hey, this post here is really relatable, useful and valuable’.  Google also indexes things put on G+ quickly, sometimes faster than content shared on Twitter and Facebook, because it owns G+ and knows the coding.

While GFC may very well be dead and gone, G+ is not.

I hope that you’ll find this somewhat helpful! These 3 things seemed to be the ones that hardly come up on others posts about SEO best practices, and it’s a good idea to start getting to grips with it all if you haven’t already. It’s also wise to keep tabs on what’s happening in the world of SEO from time to time, to see what’s changed or now considered to be bad practice.

If you have any extra info or suggestions don’t forget to share them 😉

[read more SEO: why you should learn SEO]

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