If your marketing strategy includes Tumblr, you’re probably putting a lot of effort into content creation. But your hard work deserves to be seen by the biggest audience you can get, so don’t forget to think about discoverability and visibility!

Here are some SEO and discoverability tips that we’ve compiled in the course of our recent consulting work. Just like SEO in general, these tips run the gamut from techie to creative.

Allow Search Engines To Index Your Tumblr Site
This is basic advice, but it’s easy to overlook. If you want your Tumblr site to appear in search engines, allow indexing. From the Tumblr Admin: Account Settings > Directory > Enable “Allow this blog to appear in search results.”

Do not use a Tagged Tumblr Page as Your Home Page
You may be tempted to redirect your home page URL to a tagged Tumblr page, for example, mysite.tumblr.com/tagged/all. We caution against this. As a default, Tumblr prevents tagged pages from search engine indexing. (You won’t see this if you’re looking in the usual places like robots.txt or robots meta tags. Tumblr places a “robots noindex” command in the page header, so you’d need to use a HTTP header viewer like good old Rex Swain’s HTTP viewer to see it.)

Tag Your Posts
Tags can help you get discovered in Tumblr’s search results as well as  Google’s search results.

• Depending on the Tumblr theme you use, your tags may not be visible to users. Whether tags are visible to users or not, they can help with being found in Tumblr.
• Google crawls your Tumblr home page and finds your tags there, so use tags to provide context and keywords to both your followers and Google! Ditto captions and comments on image posts – use them and get some SEO benefit.
• Only the first 20 tags are influential in Tumblr search; additional tags are ignored by Tumblr’s search algorithm.
• For more Tumblr tag ideas, view what’s trending at https://www.tumblr.com/explore/trending

Create a Compelling Brand for Discoverability 
Your Tumblr site’s avatar, header image, blog title and blog description combine to create your appearance in Tumblr discovery situations such as search results and the image that appears when a user hovers over your user name (Tumblr calls this a “popover”). Be sure to check how these elements come together in different scenarios, and make sure they are easy to scan, appealing, and convey the right message for your brand.

Identify Your Tumblr As Official 
If you run an official Tumblr in a competitive space that’s prone to copycats or fans, be sure to use the word “official” in your blog title or description.  As of this writing, Tumblr does not offer an official verification process.

No matter your level of technical expertise, we hope you found something in this post to enhance your Tumblr visibility! Now, go out and get some followers!