Actionable Tips to Rank Your Poetry Blog
While I strongly believe that a blog with well and consistently written posts can help you ace the blogging game, it’s also true that a good SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) can be the catalyst for the google ranking. Though there are plenty of resources on how to go about on-page or off-page SEO, I have always found them to work best for long-format content and not poetry.
SEO gets trickier when it comes to poetry mainly because of its brevity and also of the difficulty to stuff keywords into it. So I thought why not share a few easy and actionable tweaks that I had applied in this poetry blog of mine and found them work well. So here you go.
“Succesful SEO is not about tricking Google. It’s about partnering with Google to provide the best search results for Google’s users.”
Phil Frost
My top ranking pages
If someone had told me a few months back that you can rank your poetry blog well with just SEO, I would have laughed at them. Like, who are they kidding, huh?
As poets, while we know how difficult it is to even get our work to be seen, it is even more difficult to believe in someone talking about getting our poetry blog on the first page of google, just by SEO. So I can understand if you are reading this article through the lens of suspicion.
To ascertain that these tips work, let me start with sharing the proof first. Here are three screenshots where you can find,
- My website ranking first for the keyword “promising poetry”.
- One of my poems ranked on the first page of google images, for the keyword “lipogram poem”.
- My review of the poetry book, Gitanjali is ranked on Google’s first page.
Now that you are convinced, let me just dive into the tips part.
5 Easy and Actionable SEO Tips for Poetry Blogs
Include intro/conclusion
Brevity is the biggest enemy of poetry which makes it not feasible to rank on the first page. A minimum of 300 words count gets traction for google ranking and the lengthier it gets (quality matters too!), the better the traction is. So, here is the tweak. Try to include an introduction and/or conclusion, before/after your poetry which can help you get the desired word count.
Choose your title wise
As poets, it can be very tempting to give unusual or abstract or mystic titles to our poetry pieces but let me warn you that it can be of no help when it comes to ranking. Say, for example, one of my poems, “Rasa” wouldn’t have ranked on google images’ first page, had I titled it just as “Rasa”. Come on, who on earth would search as “A poem on Rasa”?
So, the trick here was to title it, “Rasa- A Lipogram Poem”. Now, the keyword “lipogram poem” did the magic here and brought visibility to the piece. The key takeaway here is to have a lengthy title while describing what the poem is about or the poetry format. If you wish you can add your actual creative title of the poem as a subtitle.
Keep in mind that the user is mostly a layman, looking for poems using simple words/phrases like, ‘a poem on love’, ‘ a poem on domestic abuse‘, etc.
Wait, there is also another reason the poem, Rasa, was ranked and that’s the next tip.
Add ALT tags for the images
Well, as you could have seen in the screenshots above the poem Rasa was optimised for its image. When it comes to optimising your poetry, you got to make use of all the possible ways to do so and adding attractive images is one thing to do. But it just doesn’t stop there.
Add a description of the image used using ALT tags and also in the caption of the image. This way you are helping google find your page through the images. Sometimes while the content itself may not rank, the image may rank (as in the case of my poem, here) on the top page and bring in traction or views.
Check out this easy-peasy video to learn how to add ALT tags for images:
Include video
It’s not just about lengthening your poetry post but it’s also about keeping your audience hooked and staying on your page for a considerable amount of time. Since the brevity of poetry can’t keep anyone hooked for a long time, embedding a video can help retain the reader for some time.
So get creative and go for adding a video of the spoken word version of your poem or just add a related youtube video to the page. Make sure the content of the video aligns with your poetry and doesn’t look like a forced inclusion.
Get creative
Ok, now don’t get me wrong saying we are poets and doesn’t that mean we are already creative? Well, I agree. It’s not about getting creative about poetries that I’m talking about. I’m asking you to get creative with the format of your posts that you pen for your poetry blog.
Most times, one may think that a poetry blog is all about sharing poetries but it is not. Think about everything that has got to do with poetry and pen them. Write reviews for poetry books, do poetry analysis, get a poet interviewed and write about it, etc. This way, you are still soaking in the essence of poetry while also being able to furnish long-format content which is the key to page optimisation.
In the below post on my review of Tagore’s Gitanjali , you shall find all the above points incorporated.
Concluding Words
SEO of poetry blogs can be tricky but with little tweaks here and there, you can ace the game. If you had noticed, the underlying factor behind all the tips is to make the posts “reader friendly” by giving them an insight on how or what made you come up with a poem or adding user-friendly titles or ALT text for images or videos or bringing them into your poetry world through more related educative/entertaining information.
Hope you found this post useful. Do let me know if you want to learn more on SEO specific to poetry blogs.
This post was written for the prompt “Simple SEO tricks nobody told you”, as a part of #BlogchatterBlogHop.
