I'm not gonna lie (there would be a very little point in that - I'm the worst liar you know) I'm not an SEO expert. But I can appreciate that SEO is one of the fundamentals for increasing your website traffic. You want readers to find you. But the world wide web has become so bloody WIDE that looking for a blog is worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. So, how's this meant to work? You basically have to bribe the middle man. Bribe him with keywords. With wisely placed H1, H2, H3 & even H4 tags. With relevant backlinks. Yes, the middle man's Google - and it's a bloody grumpy one, making search engine optimisation for bloggers more difficult every day.
6 ways to optimise your blog for search engines & increase your website traffic
🔎 Write excellent quality, unique content
Even if your SEO skills & awareness are below zero the one thing to kick this SEO shebang off with is a content of outstanding quality. Look at it this way - if you had the most optimised blog in the world playing in favour of the copious amount of always changing Google algorithms but your content was a copy & paste job of what someone else had for dinner the other day then no one's gonna read it anyways. Create engaging content that reads well, doesn't have a ton of grammatical errors, is topically a good fit for your blog, is refreshing and unique.🔎 Use rich keywords (in the title too!)
Keywords, keywords, keywords. No matter what the new Google algorithm update is, keywords will always stand their ground. Google uses spiders that crawl your website looking for repeated expressions and topics (kinda like when you skim through a book). There are 4 key places where to use keywords:✖️ in the body of your post
✖️ in the title of your post
✖️ in the URL of your post (in Blogger you'll find it under permalink)
✖️ in your image alt tags
🔎 Learn how to link-build
Wonder why brands want to pay you to put their link on your blog? That's exactly why. We've talked about it briefly here but internal and external links as well as backlinks are incredibly important. Google constantly evaluates your trustworthiness so when a big website (like BBC or Zoella) puts your link on their blog it will not only drive a lot of traffic your way but it will also tell Google - hey, this amazing website trusts that little website. That means the little one must be pretty damn good too - and bumps you up. Hurray!🔎 Use Google Webmaster Tools
Using Google Webmaster Tools (explore here) is not good just for submitting your sitemap (this helps Google see pages on your blog which amongst other factors might not have a very good SEO therefore it's difficult for Google to discover them & crawl them), you can also find broken links (read how to do that here) and other errors on your blog which might be currently damaging your optimisation efforts.🔎 Post regularly
I know, I know. EVERYONE says that. But they're right. Posting frequently (more than once a week) gives Google a push to come back & have a look at your website more regularly. FACT.🔎 Build your social media presence
You know when I was on about backlinks? The easiest way to build your basic backlinks is to build your social media presence. By simply just being on Twitter (and adding your link to your bio or tweeting it) you have placed a backlink on a website with one of the highest rankings out here. It's that easy.🔎 Clean up your blog template
Blogs can be dead messy - with broken links, missing header tags, missing alt tags, missing language tags... There's usually a lot of missing, broken or dead. I usually like popping my link into engines like WooRank (I dare ya - try it here) which run a complete analysis of a website telling you which areas in particular are more broken than others. If that sounds too scary then at least fix up your broken links (see how to here).But you've missed out on the ever so important header tags, metadata descriptions, keyword searches and so much more, I hear you say. Don't you worry - these are just 6 things that I believe are at the very top of the list for a better blog search engine optimisation. There will be a lot more coming in the next couple of weeks - so keep your eyes peeled!
Hope you found this post helpful and if so then please share it with your blogger friends!
