You created an interesting, modern blog and filled it with unique content. It’s high time you thought about an effective promotion which allows your potential customers to find your website or blog for a keyword request in Google. SEO for bloggers is here to help you.
It is not a time-consuming and long process at all. Over time I learned that I need to concentrate more on building authority backlinks
and less on writing articles. No need to write a huge number of articles, they should be interesting and bring you good profit. It means that the point is not the amount of material on your blog, but the quality of this material.
In this blog, I will still be telling a lot of interesting things about how to get backlinks from trusted sources, how to make your own blog grow and get lots of targeted traffic from Google.
Today we’ll talk about how to optimize posts on your blog.
Seo for bloggers: Find your target audience
Contents
- 1 Seo for bloggers: Find your target audience
- 2 Seo tips for bloggers – Summary
The most important thing is that you are obliged to write articles in the language that is understandable to everyone in which your target audience speaks. It means if your blog is about pets, and you write an article in the language of programmers for those who are interested in materials about cats and dogs, then your audience are unlikely to be interested in your articles.
So let’s find out how to optimize everything correctly so that your readers love to return to your blog again and again.
Seo For bloggers: Find out all about your audience
First, you must be aware of your niche and competitors.
This is not as easy as it sounds, especially if you are just starting out, but make sure you always encourage your audience to communicate with you.
Always post a call to action for your readers who want to post a comment with suggestions or their opinion.
If you can support this initiative, it will help you in the future, and your readers will be grateful to you.
You can also add some plugins that will help your readers to share your content all over the social networks such as facebook, twitter, instagram and many others. When they see the button share and your content is really worth sharing then they will for sure start sending it to their friends, relatives etc.
But try not to overload visitors, because they voluntarily give you time and do not want to spend it on uninteresting things.
Speed up your website… before it’s too late
Nobody usually thinks of this as an important factor, especially because most writers and bloggers are not techies.
You should always implement those seo for bloggers techniques and optimize the loading time of your blog, make the design ideal for both computers and mobile. You know that Amazon has published interesting statistics that for every 100 milliseconds of acceleration at boot, there is a 1% increase in profit. And this is not a joke! And by the way, it’s not so hard to do!
Nowadays, there is an incredible amount of WordPress plugins and outsourcing services that can help you!
It would be useful to figure out where most of your visitors come from, so then you could choose the right location for your hosting / servers.
Google Analytics or any other analytics service that works with demographic information will help you with this. Believe me, the world is changing, and we should pay more attention to the mobile market, because almost 80% of online users use smartphones daily. I would say that half of all internet users use mobile phones to surf online.
It means you need to optimize your blog. Other users could see the optimized content on tablets and mobile phones then. Now you can find a large selection of online resources that will definitely help to adapt your website and create pages for mobile users. If you don’t want to do that you can use plugins available for WordPress.
WordPress SEO Plugin
There are some great plugins that will ease your suffering with SEO optimization! They help in your work and allow you to use the right methods of working with SEO.
Yoast – is the most popular of WordPress plugins.
And, indeed, this is the most powerful and complete WordPress SEO plugin available at the moment.
It includes a snippet editor, and analysis of pages in real time (which helps to optimize the content of your pages), image headers, meta descriptions, XML sitemaps and many other cool features that are useful in optimization and available to you with full complete!
This plugin allows you to enter keywords that you want to optimize (note that in the free version you can use only one keyword). After adding all the words and content, just follow the provided tips and instructions.
Let’s look at a few important features in Yoast:
- Keyword Density: The frequency with which keywords appear per total number of words. If the keyword appears 4 times in the text in 100 words, the density will be 4%. Be careful with this value. If the keywords are found too often, the search engine will determine that you are desperate to reach the top and reduce your position.
- Alt Attributes: A description of any image in your posts that should include keywords
- Page Title: The title is very important. You should use a keyword and such strong words as “urgent”, “exclusive”, “original”, etc. Use the keyword as close to the beginning of the title as possible.
- Using main keywords in subtitles: headings that are located in the text should contain main keywords (do not overdo it, use them only in one or two subtitles).
- Your site URL is a main keyword: your URL should contain a keyword.
- Post headers and meta descriptions: Yoast SEO meta box allows you to optimize your meta descriptions and page title. You can use the preview to see how it looks in Google. It will also be useful to create heading templates and meta descriptions.
- Robots.txt settings: You don’t want Google to index your page? Yoast SEO will help! You can even prevent Google from following the links within the page. Use the Yoast plugin file editor to make changes to .htaccess and your robots.txt… Everything will be checked and ready to go!
- Readability Check: Yoast can check how SEO friendly your post is by reading readability. He will check the length of sentences and paragraphs, let you know, if you use the passive voice too often, calculate the readability index of your content, which will show how easy it is to read this text.
- Canonicity: this plugin helps to establish the correct canonical links to each of your pages.
- Breadcrumbs: the plugin allows you to achieve more substantial control. You can choose a specific title for each individual section – post or page.
- Categories: allows you to select the main and / or subcategory.
- XML sitemap: the plugin will help you in creating a Sitemap, and the use of XSLT style sheets will improve the look.
These were the most important features of the plugin. Are you willing to have more of them? Get a premium Yoast account and you will get much more features.
User experience matters
Keyword search is very important, but, nevertheless, the algorithms of modern search engines increasingly attach importance to “user experience”. This means that Google pays more attention to the length of time users spend on your blog and the number of pages viewed than to the website’s optimization itself.
Again, this does not mean that SEO is completely useless, as this optimization can increase your Google ranking. It’s just that the process itself is much more natural and simpler today
Seo for bloggers: Focus on long keywords
More precisely, these are just slightly longer keywords than you are used to using. For example, instead of writing a post titled “auto insurance,” try writing a more comprehensive description of “affordable auto insurance in the US”. It’s easy enough if you know your niche and audience.
Google has added the “Hummingbird” algorithm in 2018, the so-called latent semantic indexing (LSI) has come into play. This means that Google is trying to determine what your post is about and it tries to see that based on the text posted in it.
This just shows that long keywords are very important for a successful ranking.
By the way, you don’t have to fight for the keyword “best hotels” when you can create a super long keyword “Good hotels in South England,” for example.
What are these long keywords?
As you go through LSI, you no longer need to repeat the complete sentence or place the words in the same order. Google will automatically detect and highlight the keyword in the text.
There is one more thing that will help you with LSI – LSIgraph.
You can simply enter any keyword, and the system itself will display all the search queries associated with this keyword. And do not forget – choose a niche associated with your advertised product.
There should be something in common between your product and users. Also, you will find useful knowledge on how to use keywords from the search for better optimization and efficiency.
Your headline is very important too! It should be short (6-12 words ideally. Google shows a maximum of 70 characters in the search results). Plus, try to get your keyword closer to the beginning of the title. URL should be short too!
Remember to set up all the basic SEO HTML markup and tell Google what is the title and what is the internal headline. From SEO’s point of view, ideally your content should be at least 1,500 words long.
But even if so, do not forget about your audience. If it seems to you that a shorter text would be a better option, feel free to post it. Nevertheless, I would recommend updating the article every week and adding important details. After all, everything is changing and the information that was relevant in the article today may not be interesting to your readers tomorrow.
Don’t write long texts “just to write”, especially if there is not enough material for this. If you have an idea for a long article, then try to divide it into several posts, creating a series. This helps make your blog more user-friendly and improves your SEO in some way. You can place cross-links in these posts, which in theory are more likely to be used.
Write conveniently
Your writing style should match your audience. Moreover, it should be pleasant to you.
You know your abilities, so work on it – adapt and change the style with ease, this will give you more opportunities. There are tons of blogging instructions on the Internet, but don’t blindly follow them! Yes, brevity is the sister of talent. Short sentences are easier to learn, but your readers always have the final word.
Do not try to gain the confidence of a self-taught critic or self-proclaimed expert, speak with your audience, about her and on her behalf. Since the culture of text skimmers is now very developed on the Internet, you should make your texts easier to read by breaking them into short passages with short spaces around. Divide all this into sections with sonorous names, use bold, italics, and other formats where necessary. Lists of paragraphs will also give uniqueness and readability. It gives you the opportunity to better understand the structure and composition of the article. It is also important to write about what you really understand and what is interesting to your readers.
Do not write how Nietzsche’s works influenced you if you had never read them. Do not fall for fashion and trends, always try to provide quality content that is of interest.
Another important argument is Google’s new self-learning artificial intelligence system, RankBrain. It is used to help with the process of processing search queries.
Why is this so important to you?
Because Google’s activity and results will depend on it. In short, RankBrain can search for the right things using indirect and not quite correct queries.
Imagine that we are making the query “Donald Trump’s First Wife”. The search engine immediately shows the correct answer – Ivan Trump.
Why is this happening?
Because Google has a huge amount of data to work with, which is quite enough to get an accurate and correct answer to my illogical request, or rather a question. The search engine is sure that with high accuracy it can give an answer to almost any request, no matter how confusing and illogical it is. Moreover, since RankBrain has the ability to develop and learn, the tendency to give the right answers will only increase.
Be unique
When creating content, always bring something useful, new to readers. This will give you an advantage over competitors. Try to write unique texts, not “technically unique”, but those in which you added something from yourself. After all, visitors are interested to see your opinion and experience, their attitude to the topic, and not raw texts.Use the well-known seo for bloggers skyscraper technique.
If something has already been written and posted on your topic, do it even better. How to do it?
Try to make the text longer by adding more details and proven facts to it, you can also add your opinion and personal experience.
Multimedia takes huge steps forward, keep up
Images speak better than a thousand words! There are enough free images, so you should not have any excuses not to use it. In addition, illustrations, diagrams and infographics are a hundred times clearer than a long and boring description of a thousand words!
The same principle works with multimedia – video, animated pictures, gifs, interactive questionnaires and polls. You always have plenty to choose from.
Seo tips for bloggers – Summary
If you really want to become a great blogger – the opinion of the audience should mean a lot to you. Of course, you can’t do that without technical knowledge and SEO improvements, but this is only to attract readers and get more desired page views.
Remember the word “quality”, this is the only thing that will keep your regular readers and bring new ones. Quite simple.
Another important piece of advice is that once you have created your wonderful post and published it, your work has just begun. Oddly enough, promoting your content should take up to 70% of your time and effort.
Use these SEO tips on your blog and you will notice how your profits begin to grow by leaps and bounds!
By the way, if you are still unfamiliar with me, then I invite you to read the story about me here.
