Not all bloggers consider SEO as a part of their writing strategy; Search Engine Optimisation can often feel like a whole other world to blogging but optimising your website can be easy if you know a few simple tricks. Although SEO can be a complex and extensive project, there are a few quick tips and tricks you can pick up to help you make your blog be more visible to Google.
Making your presence known if the first step to getting people to read your blog and when we break down the traffic that comes to your site, you’ll realise that there’s a lot more to just uploading a new post to attract Google’s attention. The two areas of traffic you may want to focus on are ‘organic’ (this is the keyword driven traffic from search engines) and referral (this is traffic being referred from other websites and bloggers will usually find that top referring sites are normally social media).
Social media sharing is one of, if not the most, important part of running a blog. Interacting with others and tweeting your latest posts will help to drive a lot of traffic to your website if you are good at building up a following. But if you really want more people to read your blog, it’s worth looking at enhancing your organic traffic – and this means improving your website SEO to generate keyword driven queries to bring people to your site.
Here are some quick and easy steps to take to help boost your blog’s SEO:
1. Download SEO plugins – if you’ve been blogging using WordPress, you’ll be familiar with plugins by now. There are several plugins available through WordPress that allow you to easily optimise each page and each blog post of your website.
2. Create a keyword plan – if your blog has various pages (this is particularly useful for blogs such as travel blogs where pages / archives are added for each location or each continent). Plan out which keywords you want to use and make try and weave these into your writing, your title tags and meta descriptions.
3. Write naturally – some bloggers get carried away with search engine optimisation but the best practice SEO is to write as naturally as possible. With Google’s latest Penguin algorithm updates, it’s important that when you optimise your blog posts, you avoid any keyword stuffing which can be penalised.
4. Create a social presence – when social media first became big, there was very little proof that social media marketing could improve website SEO. But having a presence on social networks can show search engines, particularly Google Penguin, that your blog has an external presence, even without live links.
5. Guest post for others – link building is a big part of SEO but paying for links and buying low quality links can lead to penalization. The best way to build up a natural link portfolio is to link back from relevant and similar high quality websites. The best way to do this is to guest post for others. Not all bloggers accept guest posts but a great way of encouraging this is to create a blogger series which allows a group of writers to post on each other’s sites or to link to each other in a joint blog project.
James Elliot writes for the WebMarketing Group, a search engine optimisation company in Leeds. For more blogging tips or to find out the latest news on SEO, make sure you sign up to The WebMarketing Group blog.
