Do you know your SEO from your ABC? Or is your knowledge a little sketchy?
A few months ago as part of this Blog Club series I posted SEO for bloggers – 13 tips to maximise traffic. Since then I have heard lots of conversations highlighting that a fair few people still don’t SEO their blog posts. If you just write for your mum, then it probably doesn’t matter (my mum doesn’t read mine!), but if you want someone else to find and read your posts, then you really need to understand SEO and learn how to make it work for you and your blog. So if you didn’t read my other SEO post, then pop over and have a little read, I will wait here….. finished? Great, well I thought I could take things a step further and look at some other factors that influence SEO.
- Guest post on a high-ranking site – By guest posting on a high-ranking site you will get a precious back link. Not only that, but that back link will have more authority than ones from lower ranked site; Google will like that.
- Long tail keywords – over 70% of google search terms are long tail keywords – terms that are made up of 5-7 words. They are more specific and bring more targeted visitors to your blog. Think about posting about your beach holiday in Spain. Imagine how many websites have used the keywords beach holiday in spain, wait I’ll tell you… 159 million! Yep that’s right, so your blog post will be number 159,000,001. However, if you use Beach holiday in spain with a toddler (for example), it drops to 9,250,000. So there are fewer people looking, but your post will be MUCH more visible to the people wanting to read about EXACTLY what you have written about. So more people will read your post and Google will decide you are an authority and a trusted site and will rank you higher.
- Coding – Coding around your text highlights to the search bots the important parts of your post. So use things like <H1> headings, a unique and relevant title for each page and make sure all your pages have a proper meta tag description.
- Blog Speed – The faster your blog loads the happier your readers will be, they will return more and Google will see this. Making sure you reduce the size of your pictures can have an effect, but if you google ‘making my blog load faster’ you will find lots of help.
- Use your keyword across social media – Social media is contributing more to SEO all the time. Therefore, use the same keyword used in your blog post in your social media promotion.
- Submit a site map to search engines – Site maps help make your blog easier to search for. This might seem very complicated, however, there is a WordPress plugin called the Google XML Sitemap Generator. Simply install it, change the settings as appropriate and it will automatically update your site map and submit changes to search engines. Simple!
- Make sharing your posts easy – This is a bit obvious, but the easier it is to share your posts, the more people will do so and consequently the more traffic you will get. Pleasing Google along the way.
- Share your post on Google+ – Sharing posts on Google + will help your SEO more than a share on any other social media platform (assuming your following are equal).
- Email your posts – Help people to find your posts. Don’t forget that traffic is still one of the highest factors in terms of rankings on search engines.
- SEO agencies – There are many unscrupulous SEO agencies who charge a lot of money and can actually do your blog damage. I don’t know about you, but I receive these emails multiple times a day!
- Learn how to do SEO yourself – A private SEO course that is relevant to your blog is usually more effective than learning general SEO theory in a public class.
Do you regularly SEO your posts?
Disclosure: This is a collaborative post.
