Blog best practice for seo

1

Hi,
Pardon my lack of knowledge but for SEO purposes do you want the search engines to see the index and not individual blog post pages? When search engine shows link to a blog post page it returns ‘forbidden’ or 404

So in other words I need to optimise the index only?

Also does the blog post title automatically have H1 tag?

Thanks

2

SEO @mccauld is one of the mysteries of life!!! :slight_smile: :rofl:
But it is important so the people looking for what you offer can find you.

You should not be getting 404, so something is wrong there on your end.
It is very important to work your blog post SEO as that can be a great help to better your search engine ranking.

Yes, Sparkle automatically assigns a blog post title as a H1 tag, so very important in how you craft your blog post page title.

3

Hi.

That should not happen. Have you some special settings like password protection, hidden folder, search engine restrictions?

Mr. F.

4

Thanks for all the replies. I have spotted the error. I renamed the url and search engine was linking to previous url.

Can I also ask-
I have “optimise for search engine” checked on both blog index page and blog post page

Is this procedure correct?

thanks again for help

5

Yes @mccauld, correct procedure…

6

The “optimize for search engines” is half of the work, the second half is running the SEO assistant and following its suggestions to improve the page.

This is more or less the workflow, and it’s the same for any page, not just blog posts:

  • for the page you’re working on, decide what Google search you are aiming to be found for
  • enter that search query in the keyphrase text box right below the “optimize for search engines” checkbox
  • do the same for all other pages you find it worth doing for
  • run the SEO assistant
  • fix the issues the SEO assistant points out

Many Sparkle users enter a bunch of keywords in the keyphrase box and assume this will signal search engines something that makes them rank for them. That’s not the case (and the confusion is our problem to solve).

Nobody ever enters a bunch of keywords when searching in Google (or any other search engine), so you need to focus each page of your site on a well defined query. The more vague the query is the less focused your page will be, and that’s also a problem.

The optimization for a query is one part of the search engine ranking question, the second is your domain reputation, a somewhat opaque score that search engines build based on a history of links from other domains to yours. So that’s why you most likely have no hope of ranking for “hotel in paris” or “pizza in new york”, but for local businesses in smaller cities or less popular products and services you very definitely have a shot.

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7

Thanks @flaminfig and thanks Duncan. Really informative reply on SEO