Blogging success and blog readers are not an overnight phenomenon. As well as great ideas and great content, a blog also needs SEO support and with the right process and a dose of patience, it’s not too challenging – even for those running their own blog.
If you’re looking for a starter for ten, here are my top tips to help increase search traffic to your blog over time. To take your SEO performance to the next level you’ll need the help of professionals such as these guys https://www.click.co.uk/in-house-team-consultancy-support/organic-search-house-support/
Do your research.
Keyword research is essential for on page optimisation. Chances are you are naturally including keywords without realising it simply by providing valuable content on a topic. However, there are a variety of tools and techniques for finding related keywords relevant to your blog post that you may not have considered. The Google Adwords Keyword Tool is a great tool that allow you to find keywords related to your topic and even spy on your favourite blogs to see what words and phrases they are targeting to bring traffic to their sites.
Utilize keywords throughout your post.
Once you have targeted a couple of valuable, relevant keywords, it is important to place them where they will have the most impact for humans and search engine crawlers indexing your content. Try to include them in the following places:
- Title
- Headings and subheadings
- Introductory sentence
- Concluding paragraph
- Anchor text (text you hyperlink to other related pages on your site)
- Title tags and meta descriptions
A word of caution: Don’t engage in keyword stuffing, which is the act of filling your content with so many keywords that it becomes difficult to read. Not only will this irritate your blog readers, making your content difficult to read, it will also get you penalised by Google. A couple of strategically placed keywords is enough.
Optimise your images.
Whenever you upload an image to your blog, be sure to include keywords in the file name and fill out the alternate text field with a brief, keyword rich description of the photo.
Reference others with links.
When you mention another website, blogger or article in your blog post, include a link to the information you are referencing. Not only is it good blogging etiquette, but you may also get lucky and receive a link back. Quality links are a valuable commodity for any site looking to rank higher in search engine results pages.
Give readers the opportunity to subscribe to your blog.
Include prominently placed RSS or Feed Subscription Buttons and offer viewers the ability to subscribe to your posts via email when possible. This allows your blog followers to have instant notification of your latest posts without having to periodically check your site for new content.
Social media sharing
You may already have a Facebook page, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest profile, or other social media sites to create connections with new and existing readers. Use relevant hashtags for the content to help reach new readers and make sharing regularly easy with a free content scheduler like Hootsuite to keep your social profiles all updated with your latest posts.
I hope you have found this helpful – just to be clear this is not something where you follow this process and you will have instant results. That’s never going to be the case. That’s just not how it works. That doesn’t happen for anyone in blogging. Post, publish, promote, analyse, apply the information that you learn, and post again. The more you publish, learn and apply, the better you will become at blogging and the more readers and traffic you will attract.
