How to Improve the SEO of Your Devblog Articles

How to Improve the SEO of Your Devblog Articles

Hey there Devbloggers,

In my previous post, I explained why you should worry about SEO and how to improve the overall SEO of your blog. For those of you who haven't created their blog with Devblog, you should definitely give it a spin before proceeding with this article.

In this post, I'll show you how to optimize your blog posts to reach more people. I've noticed that a lot of devs struggle not only with SEO but also with writing itself, so I'll do my best to give you some practical tips you can use in all of your articles.

Think about the audience and the keywords

Why are you writing the post and who is your target reader? Based on your audience, you can guess how they would search for a similar article, and think of a title which would feature the keywords they'd use.

Are you solving a problem? Do you want to teach people how to use a specific tool? Avoid titles that don't make it clear what the article is about. Try being as specific as possible - mention the technology and what you're doing with it.

For example:

❌ Don't name the article "How I Solved an Issue I Struggled With for Months"

✅ Go for "How to use [name of the tool] and [do something with it]", "How [name of the tool] solved[the problem]", etc. instead.

Explain what the article is about

Make sure to add the introduction section and explain what the article is going to be about. Help the reader understand what to expect and try to get them interested in the rest of the article. Mentioning keywords in the first paragraph is also important from the SEO perspective, so don't miss out on this!

Use the subheaders

There's nothing worse than seeing a wall of text. Personally, I don't bother reading such posts because of the stress they cause to my eyes. Also, I'm not the only one who does this. Make sure to split your text in paragraphs with the appropriate subheadings, and help the readers go through your post.

If possible, make sure to use the keywords in the subheadings to improve the SEO. The best practice is to use H2 and H3 for subheaders.

In Markdown, you need to add ## for H2 and ### for H3 subheaders.

## This is a subheader level 2

### This is a subheader level 3

Optimize the images and avoid adding too many GIFs

In order for the page to rank well, it should be as lightweight as possible. Adding GIFs and images will help you break the text and explain things easier, but make sure not to add to many of them. The page won't rank well if it takes too much time to load it on mobile. This is why enabling AMP support on Devblog will help you. (Your dashboard -> SEO tab - last item )

Before uploading an image, make sure it's optimized for the web. I personally use this online compressing tool to optimize all the images before adding them to my post.

Moreover, make sure to use the proper keywords within images. Here's an example in Markdown

![image keyword](link to the image "title of the image")

Hashnode logo

This is what pure HTML looks like

<img src="https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1565263862618/78qTVgk5w.png" alt="Hashnode logo" title="Hashnode logo">

Alternative text as well as title text is one of the things that web crawlers take into consideration when going through the page. So, if you want to nail the SEO of your Devblog post, make sure to always add keywords here, but don't overdo it.

Moreover, make sure to use only images you've made or that you are allowed to. Don't use copyrighted ones, that can bring more trouble as Google's algorithm is getting more and more advanced and you can get penalized if you're caught stealing. I wrote a separate article about this topic too , make sure to check it out for more details.

Add the conclusion section

Same as with the introduction section, reflect on the article and repeat the keywords since this is what Google takes into consideration quite a lot. Make sure not to overdo the overall keyword placement, but make it natural and remember to mention keywords several times in the whole text.

Be original

Don't copy-paste other people's sentences off of the internet. If your content isn't original, it won't rank well no matter how hard you try to optimize it. You can add references at the end of the article, or link to other posts that your readers can find helpful.

Conclusion

TLDR:

In order to SEO optimize your Devblog posts

  • Use keywords in the title
  • Use keywords in the subheaders
  • Optimize the images
  • Add intro and summary
  • Don't copy-paste sentences you found online, be original

Hope you enjoyed this post. Let me know what would you like me to cover in the future ones!

P.S. Please help us spread the word about Devblog and mention it to your dev friends. Let's grow together!