Optimize images

You should optimize your blog post images for accessibility and to help them rank in Google Images—which can send more traffic your way.

For example, here’s our blog traffic from Google Images for the past 3 months:

Here’s how to optimize your images:

Use descriptive filenames. Think cute-puppy.jpg, not IMG_95742.jpg.

Add descriptive alt text. Describe your images in a few words to help visually impaired users that use screen readers.

Compress them. Use a plugin like ShortPixel or EWWW Image Optimizer for this.

Recommended reading: Image SEO: 12 Actionable Tips

Add a table of contents

A table of contents links to important subsections of your post and helps visitors find the information they’re looking for.

Here’s an example from this very post:

Ours is custom coded, but free plugins like Easy Table of Contents make it easy to add a table of contents to pretty much any post.

Besides the UX benefits, a table of contents can also help trigger sitelinks on posts in the SERPs—which can potentially help you win even more organic clicks.

Here’s an example from our guide to 301 redirects:

These are sections listed in our table of contents:

Recommended reading: What Are Sitelinks? How to Influence Them

Include ‘linkable snippets’

Linkable snippets are pieces of information that entice people to link to your blog posts.

Getting more links is important because they’re a known ranking factor. Google has told us this on many occasions, and we also found a clear correlation between backlinks and organic traffic in our study of over one billion pages.

But how do you know what constitutes a ‘linkable snippet’ for your topic?

Here’s a simple method:

Plug the top-ranking page for your keyword into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer

Go to the Anchors report

Look for common reasons in the anchors

If we do this for one of the top-ranking posts for “SEO techniques,” we see many people linking due to statistics.

We can probably entice more people to link to our post on the topic by including similar statistics.

If we do this for one of the top posts about SEO copywriting, we see many people linking because of two unique concepts:

The workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on. Clicks are the number of clicks coming to your website’s URL from organic search results.

If we wanted to get more backlinks to our post about SEO copywriting, we should probably include a couple of our own unique ideas in the post.

Add schema markup

Schema markup is code that helps search engines to better understand and showcase your content in the search results.

For blog posts, the main use of schema markup is to win rich snippets like this:

Rich snippets can increase clicks and lead to more organic traffic to your blog posts.

So how do you know if you should add schema markup to your post?

Here’s a quick cheat sheet: