3 Recommended Google Guidelines for Blogging Success

June 24, 2022

Google is constantly changing its algorithms, and as a blogger, it’s essential to stay up-to-date with the latest changes.

You must create content in line with Google’s guidelines if you want to be a successful blogger. The main reasons why Google gives these guidelines are:

  • To provide the best user experience
  • To ensure that the search engine results are as relevant as possible
  • To help bloggers create quality content

To help you in your content creation journey, we’ve compiled a list of three recommended Google guidelines for blogging success.

1: Optimize Your Blog for Search Engines​​

For your blog to be successful, you need to optimize it for search engines.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of making your blog more visible on search engine results pages (SERPs). The better you implement your SEO practices, the higher your blog will rank in SERPs, and the more visitors you’ll get.

While there are a lot of factors that go into SEO, there are some simple tricks to improve your blog’s SEO ranking.

The following are some of the best SEO tips you should adhere to:

Use Relevant Keywords

Keywords are the foundation of any good SEO strategy. These are words and phrases people use when searching for information on the internet.

For your blog to be visible in SERPs, you need to use relevant keywords throughout your blog posts.

However, don’t go overboard with keywords: a few strategically placed keywords do the trick. Google will penalize you for keyword stuffing, and it will make your article’s writing look unnatural.

The following are some strategic locations to place your keywords:

  • In your article’s title
  • Headings and subheadings
  • Introductory sentence
  • Concluding paragraph

Semrush, Ubersuggest, and Ahrefs are examples of good keyword research tools. These tools are all differently priced so choose one that suits your budget.

Use Alt Tags

An alt tag is an HTML attribute that allows you to provide a brief description of an image. This is important for the following reasons:

  • Alt tags describe when an image is when web pages don’t load.
  • Search engines use alt tags to index images. So, if you want your images to show up in SERPs, you need to use alt tags.

When writing alt tags, be sure to keep them short (between 4 and 10 words), relevant, and descriptive.

Use Meta Descriptions

example of meta description

A meta description is a brief description of your blog post that appears on the SERP.

It’s your only chance to entice readers to click on your blog post, so it needs to be interesting and accurate.

Keep in mind that your meta descriptions should be no more than 150 characters. Otherwise, Google will cut it off.

Add Internal Links

An internal link is a link that points to another page on your website. Internal linking is essential for two reasons:

  • It improves the user experience by making it easier for readers to find related content.
  • It improves your SEO by giving search engines more information about your website.

When adding internal links to your blog posts, use relevant keywords as the anchor text.

This will improve your blog’s ranking for those keywords.
Achieving all these SEO requirements is one of the reasons to hire SEO copywriting services. Our copywriting services adhere to all these requirements to ensure your website ranks high in SERPs.

Contact us for more information on our SEO copywriting services.

2: Create Quality Content

If you want people to keep coming back for more, you need to produce high-quality content regularly. This doesn’t mean you have to write War and Peace. Instead, focus on providing valuable information that your readers will find interesting and helpful.

According to Google, “high-quality content” is useful, informative, and engaging. It should also be well-written, accurate, and original. So keep that in mind when creating your next blog post.

“96% of the most successful content marketers strongly believe that the credibility of their organizations increased because of high-quality content.” Lisa Murton Beets

The following are the components of high-quality blog content:

  • Headings and subheadings: These are used to break up the text to make it easy to read and structure your article to help skim readers.
  • Imagery: These break up long text and make the content visually appealing.
  • Helpful links: Provide additional information for readers and are also good for SEO.
  • Clear, concise, and easy-to-read style: Helps readers to understand and follow your points more easily. It’s recommended to use short sentences and paragraphs.

Also avoid thin content. Thin content refers to content that adds no value to the text. In other words, it’s fluff.

Google doesn’t like fluff.

The following are some examples of what counts as thin content:

  • Duplicate content: Copying and pasting content from other websites is frowned upon by Google and can lead to penalization.
  • Padding: This refers to adding filler content to increase the word count and it’s another way to get penalized by Google.
  • Low-quality content: This is poorly written content, doesn’t offer any value to the reader and is generally unenjoyable to read.

Expert Tip: When you get information like statistics from other websites, you must acknowledge the source by citing it.

3: Make Sure Your Website Is Mobile-Friendly

With more and more people using their smartphones and tablets your website must be mobile-friendly.

Google has been giving preferential treatment to mobile-friendly websites ever since they released their Mobile-Friendly Test. This is a test done on websites to ensure that they’re compatible with mobile devices.

A mobile-friendly website has a responsive design that automatically adjusts to a device’s screen size.

If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you’re probably losing out on a lot of traffic.

Use the Google Mobile Friendly Test to check if your website is mobile-friendly. Once the test is complete, you’ll get a notification telling you whether your website is mobile-friendly.

If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, there are a few tricks you can use to make it more responsive:

  • Use a responsive WordPress theme like Astra.
  • Install a plugin like WP-Rocket to cache your images and decrease the load time of the website.
  • Hire a developer to create a custom mobile theme for your website.
  • Eliminate pop-ups as they reduce the loading time of your website.

Expert Tip: Google Search Console (GSC) is an excellent tool to get more information about how your website is performing in SERPs. Not only will it give you insights into your website’s traffic, but it’ll also show you which keywords your website is ranking for.

Keep checking the error section in GSC to make sure your website is mobile-friendly and free of any technical issues that can hold it back from ranking higher in SERPs.

The video below illustrates five tips to make your website mobile-friendly:

Over To You Now

We understand that you’re occupied with running your business to generate more sales. CopySmiths is here to take care of your blog content requirements.

We create high-quality blog content at scale for businesses. We also handle keyword research, content creation, and publishing.

The best part? Our content generation services are pocket friendly, so don’t hesitate to contact us for any clarifications.

Pros and Cons of Hiring Content Services

“We’ve used many content writing services, and Copysmiths was by far the most responsive and organized. They also uploaded the posts they wrote directly to our CMS, which was a big help. Eric Thomas, CRD Design Build

Hiring content writing services makes your work easier. It also increases your publishing frequency as you can order many blog posts at once.

However, are you aware of the challenges in hiring content writing services?
The table below illustrates the pros and cons, including these challenges.

ProsCons
High-quality articles for your websiteThe services are expensive
Increase your organic traffic through quality content that meets SEO specificationsYou must be aware of plagiarism issues as Google penalizes duplicate content
Saves time because you can order many articles at a goYou have to write briefs for each article, which is tedious
When you order blog content from companies like CopySmiths, your article goes through many checks and edits to ensure the highest standards possibleEnforcing deadlines is a challenge. If you need the content urgently, you’ll have to keep checking in to ensure timely delivery

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I get my blog noticed by Google?

You can get your blog noticed by Google by using target keywords, optimizing your website for mobile, building more web pages, and using internal linking.

How do you rank higher in Google?

To rank higher in Google, you must target keywords with little competition, improve your on-page SEO, build high-quality backlinks, and create high-quality content.

Although these are the main factors, other issues like images, website loading speed also play a role.

Why do bloggers fail?

Bloggers fail for various reasons, but the most common reasons are failing to use SEO correctly, not creating high-quality content, and failing to target the right keywords.

If your website is new and you go for highly competitive keywords, you don’t rank high in SERPs. Start by targeting keywords with low competition. This will give you the best chance to rank higher while generating traffic.

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Katrina McKinnon

CopySmiths

I'm Katrina McKinnon, founder of CopySmiths and Small Revolution. In my 20 years of experience, I have helped online businesses create high-performing content specifically on an eCommerce store's blog. Find me on LinkedIn and Twitter.