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Blogging means big business. Companies blog to promote their products and websites. Travelers blog to earn income on the road. It seems that everyone is blogging! Never before has blogging played such an important role in the online world.
Running a blog can help boost exposure, increase customers, and improve your SEO. These are all important aspects of digital marketing that will ultimately help your brand and business.
If you want to start a blog, you must understand how to optimize it for search engines. Ranking high on search engines is still hugely important. Let’s say you have a cooking blog, for example, specializing in European cuisine. If someone typed in on Google “best homemade cooking recipes”, you would want your blog to appear high on the search results.
Search engine optimization can help achieve this! You must essentially make your blog easy to read for search engines, so they can index it. In the below paragraphs, I will share the basics of blogging search engine optimization.
The Golden Rule – Create Regular Original Content
Above anything else, content is king. Regardless of what SEO strategies you put in place, you MUST have quality and consistent content. You could have a responsive blog theme, active social media accounts, and a self-hosted domain; if you only post a rushed article once every two months, those optimizations are worthless!
This is where most bloggers fall short. They start a blog with the best of intentions. For the first few weeks, they make awesome regular posts. After that, they simply stop posting. Don’t be that blogger! Create regular content (preferably weekly), and make your posts unique and interesting! This can help SEO greatly in an organic way.
Other Important Blogging SEO Tips and Guidelines
The above is certainly the golden rule, but there are many other optimization techniques you can use too. Please bear in mind that SEO is continually evolving – what worked last month might not be relevant today. The following are 6 SEO blogging tips that will certainly help:
1) Ensure Your Blog Is Self–Hosting and Has a Unique Domain Name
You should NEVER use a blogging subdomain. By using a subdomain, you are automatically reducing the perceived quality and authority of your blog. If someone sees the domain indianSpice.blogger.com, they automatically think your blog isn’t serious.
Basically, the common perception of subdomains/hosting is that you aren’t serious about your blog – if you were serious, you would have taken the time and effort to purchase your own hosting and domain name!
Purchase a domain name. Ensure that domain name is relevant and contains a keyword if possible. This will improve the authenticity of your blog. Google will consider it to be trustworthy.
2) Ensure Your Blog Theme Is Optimized for SEO
The blog theme you choose can greatly help your SEO. A blog should be optimized for search engines. This includes loading times, mobile responsiveness, and clean code.
A fast-loading site provides a favorable user experience – no one wants to be waiting for a page to load. Moreover, Google treats better those websites that have faster loading index. Note that high-resolution images and complex design might harm your site loading speed. Consider removing or optimizing images using background remover. In case nothing helps, think about redesigning your blog completely.
- One more crucial thing you should be aware of is that your blog will be marked down if it isn’t mobile friendly. Furthermore, users will simply find it harder to use. Finally, clean HTML and CSS code can help search engines read and index your blog easier.
- One more crucial thing you should be aware of is that your blog will be marked down if it isn’t mobile friendly. Furthermore, users will simply find it harder to use. Finally, clean HTML and CSS code can help search engines read and index your blog easier.
3) Create Quality, Natural Backlinks
Search engines analyze backlinks to your blog. A backlink is a URL to your blog on another website/blog. The more quality backlinks you have, the greater your SEO will be. We put the emphasis on QUALITY, however – this is important. In ages past, bloggers would simply spam backlinks without a thought to their quality or relevance.
Your backlinks should be natural. They should come from complementary or similar websites. Moreover, they should contain a genuine comment/piece of information – not just link spam. It is also advisable to avoid purchasing links – this technique does not yield favorable results nowadays.
4) Maintain Active Social Media Accounts and Promote Your Blog Through Them
It is believed that Google looks at social media activity to help determine the authority of your blog. Basically, someone with an active social media presence who has thousands of followers would be deemed an authoritative figure and thus rank higher.
Therefore, you should strive to build your social media presence. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are the main players here. Stay active on social media, and build up your audience. Not only will this help your SEO, but it will also increase exposure to your blog.
5) Comment on Other Complimentary Blogs
Commenting on other blogs has a double effect – it can gain you more traffic, but it also helps build backlinks too. Ensure that you use your real name and email address when leaving a comment – never leave a fake name. Include a link to your own blog, but don’t make it obvious or spammy.
Moreover, the actual comment should be constructive and useful. Try and engage the blog owner in a conversation that could steer them towards your blog. The more your own blog and name is flaunted around the internet, the more authoritative your blogging brand will appear – this, of course, is beneficial for SEO.
6) Consider Using SEO Tools Such As Yoast and SEO Moz
There are numerous SEO tools that can really help you dissect your blog and optimize it to a high degree. Yoast is a fantastic tool and can work with WordPress blogs. You can use this tool to analyze your keyword usage within your blog.
Moreover, you can use it to look at the readability of your content and improve your META data. SEO Moz operates in a similar fashion and provides you with a plethora of statistical reports and analysis too. Tools such as these can give you valuable insight and really take your blog optimization to the next level.
Final Words
I hope you have found these tips useful. Blogging can be an extremely worthwhile venture when done correctly. Make use of these basic tips today and improve your search engine optimization tenfold!
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