How To: Optimise My Steemit Blog + Increase Opportunities

Steemit has built a great foundation and as long as you're writing high-quality fresh content that people want to read, you will be successful on your Steem-Journey. However, there are some quick yet highly effective tweaks you can do to your content before publishing it to ensure you enhance the SEO of your page and maximise it's potential.

Increasing the SEO of your page gives you the potential to rank higher & in turn, increase the visitor count. More visitors = more potential UpVotes!

How Do I Optimise My Steemit Blog?

Below I'm going to list some of the key things we can do to optimise our Steemit Blogs and then I will break them down for you one by one.

Choose A Primary Keyword For Your Post
Optimise Your Title + Permalink
Use Header Tags For Sub-Titles
Use Relevant Images
Link Internally & Externally
Emphasise Keywords With Bold + Italic
Use Relative Keywords/Phrases
Avoid Keyword Stuffing

Choosing A Primary Keyword For Your Steemit Post

Let's say you're writing a post about the new Google Pixel 2 XL because you've just bought one after finally ditching Apple (I'm still with Apple haha).

You don't think much about keywords and you titled your post 'So I Got A New Phone...' and it pulled in a few visitors, cool. - But what if I told you by tweaking your post you could have 100s or even 1000s of visitors queing to read your content?

If we spend a little time to think about what's trending and what users are typing into search engines, we could almost definitely increase the number of visitors we get. I'm certain a post titled 'Google Pixel 2 XL vs Apple iPhone 7S Plus' would gain a lot more visitors.

Make a list of all the search terms users would type to find your post and then checkout the search volume and competition for that keyword/phrase. You can use online software such as Google's Keyword Planner or The Hoth's Keyword Planner, which will show you keywords, how difficult it could be to compete for the #1 position and the search volume.

Tip: Sometimes it's best to avoid highly competitive keywords with high search volumes and target the medium search volumes with lower competition. You have a better chance of ranking higher with little effort.

Optimise Your Title + Permalink

A permalink is the part of your post URL that comes after your username on Steemit. For example, my username here is aefx786 and anything that comes after the trailing slash '/' after my username is considered the permalink.

Notice how the permalink matches my post Title.

Once you know the keyword/phrase you're going to target, think of a catchy title for your blog post. It should be a title that entices the user to click on your post from the list of Google search results and must contain the target keyword/phrase, preferably nearer the beginning of the title for extra keyword strength.

We want to build keyword relevance and Steemit helps by automatically syncing the post permalink to the title. All you need to do is think of a catchy and well-optimised title, which includes the target keyword/phrase at the start and Steemit does the rest for you in the background.

Tip: Although we want the target keyword at the start of the title, it must make sense and be easy to read. There is such a thing as 'over optimising' and you don't want to be penalised for this. You should always consider the user experience as number 1 priority in every decision you make.

Using Header Tags For Sub-Titles

The two most important header tags which I say you should include on every post is your H1 and your H2 header tags. The H1 should include your primary keyword, the keyword that you've chosen to target and have placed in your post title. Again, the keyword is best placed at the start or nearer the start of the header tag to ensure maximum keyword strength.

How Do I Use Header Tags

Simply type out the following to create a header:
<h1>YOUR MAIN HEADER HERE</h1>
<h2>YOUR SUB-HEADER HERE</h2>

Tip: I've used H3 to give myself the Sub-Heading 'How Do I Use Header Tags' under the H2 sub-heading.

The H2 sub-heading tag should include keywords/phrases relative to the one you're targetting. This will help to build the keyword relevance on the page and Google will see that you are using the correct page structure to ensure a good user experience.

Use Keyword Relevant Images

Putting up an image of a dog on a page about the new Google Pixel phone will not win you any brownie points. Think about the user - every image increases the page size and the users browser must download the page before it can be displayed - too many images can slow the page down, which equals to poor user experience.

Tip: Use images that are relevant to the topic. I always rename my images so that the filename is also keyword relevant and I also optimise that image in Photoshop 'For Web Use' so that it downloads faster for my users.

Link Internally & Externally

If you've got another relevant article in your blog that may be of benefit to the user, definitely link to it from your post. Internal links to relevant posts will add to building the page relevance and shows you have plenty of useful content for users to indulge.

If you're citing information from a third-party site, it's always a good idea to link to the source of the original content. It would be useful for your visitors and can increase the user experience.

Emphasise Keywords with Bold + Italic

When Google crawls your post it will scan the keyword density of the page and all the relevance of the page content to understand what the page is about and then determine how your page should rank and for what keywords - so this step is not entirely necessary, however, by placing your target keyword (primary keyword) in bold tags and even italic tags can tell Google that this keyword is of most importance.

Use Relative Keywords/Phrases

I think I've covered this quite a bit above but basically the idea is building keyword relevance across the page and showing Google that you haven't just created a page with 'thin content' but in fact, you've gathered together as much information on the topic as you could and now have a highly informative page that talks about all aspects of the topic.

This means the user is more likely to find the information they desire from just visiting one page = Great User Experience!

Avoid Keyword Stuffing

There was a time when you could fill your page with jargon, lots of keywords but no real information and even sneakily hide invisible text all over the page to build up the keyword strength of the page - we're talking 10+ years ago but some people are still foolish enough to try it.

Avoid unnaturally filling your page with keywords. Read the post back to yourself and if you feel it doesn't flow naturally and a certain word is being repeated way too many times, then the chances are it has been repeated too many times and you should consider re-writing it.

Keyword Stuffing = ...Yes, you've guessed it... Bad User Experience!

I can not emphasise enough how much Google is concentrating on User Experience. There is so much more to consider when fully optimising a page and actually, a lot of it is being handled by the core of the Steemit platform already (apart from Blog Categories).

Hopefully, you've found the information in this post really helpful and if it has helped you, please feel free to give me a vote & share your experiences below.

How To: Optimise My Steemit Blog + Increase UpVote Opportunities