You blog because you want to share your knowledge; you also blog because you want to drive traffic to your website and rank highly in the search results.

You already know about the basic SEO stuff to do with on-page factors and link building, but there are myriad other factors that get overlooked.

Granted, you’ll never smash them all, but it’s worth spending some time on the easy ones to make sure your blogs have a more significant impact.

Here are five simple but effective tactics you should be using.

Stunning headlines

How do great headlines help your rankings?

Well, more click-throughs in the search results boost your rankings because the algorithm will attach more value to your blog.

So if you rank relatively low, but get a lot of clicks, your ranking will rise. However, if you rank highly and you don’t get click-throughs, your blog will be deemed irrelevant to that search term, and your rankings will fall.

Therefore, eye-catching headlines improve your rankings.

Use images to boost your rankings

Using images to link to your blog will increase your rankings and provide some diversity to your backlinks.

The Alt tag tells the search engines about the content of your image. When using an image to link to your blog post, the Alt tag serves as a keyword.

The best way to get these link-based backlinks is to create an infographic for others to use – ask for an image backlink to your original post.

Do-follow vs. no follow

You aim to get do-follow links because they show your blog is of high quality and a trusted source of information.

The problem is a lot of profile sites, and blogs only provide no follow links. An excessive amount of these will make your blog appear untrusted – not good.

Buying in links (please say you don’t do that) is the quickest way to ruin your rankings. Instead, concentrate on guest blogging for high-quality blogs.

Linking to trusted blogs

Outbound links are just as relevant as inbound ones.

As a trusted and high-quality blog, you’ll be expected to link to other high-quality blogs if you want to raise the value of your blog in the eyes of the search engines.

Short or long blogs?

OK, yes you could probably write a useful and informative high-quality blog post that’s short, but the search engines love long content.

But not only should your content be lengthy (but still high quality, relevant and informative), you also need to work on getting comments. This will help boost the length of the unique content of each post.

Although none of these ideas are revolutionary, they often overlooked. Simple and easy to carry out, these tips will help you get more out of your blogging.

Please feel free to leave a comment if you have any further ideas on how to get the best rankings from your blogging, or if you have any questions.