I did an auditing to my website between July and August.

As you may know, I run a blog where I write about films, TV, literature, and anything that makes my brain go wild. I started on late 2020, and I’ve always had some visitors. Not TONS of visitors, but enough for the niche topics that I write about.

However, I’m always trying to reach new readers (as writers should do!). And that’s why I felt like some deep inspection on my SEO was necessary.

I know the SEO basics and good practices (I’ve learned a lot in space!), so I checked technical and content aspects, and discovered some really important issues that were affecting my ranking on the SERPs.

After fixing them, this is how my Google Search Console started to look:

Pretty cool, right?

So, here are the essential tips that -even if you know them-, you should not forget (as I did):

This is fundamental to tell GoogleBot what you are talking about on your page. If there are two or more, it can confuse it.

I used to have this problem with my website because of its WordPress template: the name of the website was an H1 by default.

So both of these were H1:

The solution was very simple, actually. I just edited the index HTML. It took me literally 2 seconds.

And, of course, always remember to put the keyword you want to position in there.

This may sound like more of a copywriting advice, but it can also help you with the SEO.

Yes, a first paragraph should invite the reader to continue in your post, but it should also respond to the user intent of search.

I discovered that some of my entries were lacking of an introductory paragraph that clarifies what my text (and my site!) was aboutso when I started to include that, I noticed that the readers stayed longer.

When you are surfing the net, you are in a kind of dreamy stateso remember to always give context of what you are offering. This will help your reader, and also the crawling of the search engine bot.

This is something I’ve struggled since I started my blog.

At the beginning I didn’t want to have static Categoriesbecause I was so full of ideas for writing that I wasn’t sure how the editorial guidelines would evolveso my URLs just looked like: mysite.com/a-new-entry

But when I found my recurring topics, it was the moment to group entries and change URLs to a more self-explanatory link: mysite.com/books/a-new-entry

This will give you a better web architecture and UX (remember the breadcrumbs too!), but…

This can bring you a problem if both links are indexed by Google, because having duplicated content will decrease your ranking:

To avoid that, remember to add a canonical tag signaling which is the correct URL to follow. I did it using Yoast SEObut the line of code is quite simple:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://nishankhatri.xyz/>

Also, be sure to add 301 Redirects from the old to the new URL, so all your SEO efforts are transfer from one to another.

Really basic but really forgettable: super huge images are not recommended at all.

Check that you are using the .webp format in your images, the lightest and most modern format. I transform some PNG to WEBP using Convertit’s easy and secure.

Besides that, remember that using your keywords in the Alt texts and in the name of the archive is also useful to give more context.