It's been a long time since people were just blogging for their health and hobby. LiveJournal is gone, MySpace is a shell of its former self. Nowadays, blogging is used to disseminate information with the intention to cultivate followers. For brands, for influencers, for just born babies even, SEO has become an obsession for many.
You've already learned about trends and the basic SEO stuff to do with on-page factors and link building, but there are a ton of other factors that often get overlooked.
Granted, you'll never have a perfectly SEO crafted post, but it's worth checking on the easy ones to make sure your blogs have a wider, and extensive reach.
Here are five simple but effective tips you should be using.
Page Contents
You've had a title of a news article or magazine just jump out at you. Attention grabbing headlines have proven to be the best lures for content.
It's known that "jump out at you" post titles boost your rankings because they equate to click-throughs and the algorithm will attach more value to your blog with each click your article gets.
So if you rank relatively low, but get a lot of clicks, your ranking will rise. But, if you rank highly and you don't get click-throughs, search engine crawlers will think its irrelevant to that search term, and your rankings will fall.
Consequently, eye-catching headlines improve your rankings.
Using images to link to your blog will increase your rankings and provide some diversity to your backlinks.
Since keyword stuffing is a big no-no, you can use alt text to add more keyword depth to your posts. You were going to throw in an image or two anyway, so why not put them to work?
The best way to get link-based backlinks is to create an infographic for others to use. Simply ask those linking to it for a backlink to your original post. Gotta be social, right?
Your aim is to get follow links because they show your blog is of high quality and a trusted source of information. Most sites and other blogs utilize some form of nofollow extensions to help lessen crawler confusion.
An excessive amount of these nofollow links will make your blog appear untrusted, and that's exactly what you don't want.
Buying links is the quickest way to ruin your rankings. Never trust anyone saying they'll boost your ranking by buying backlinks for you. Instead, concentrate on guest blogging, joining podcasts, or utilizing social media.
Outbound links are just as important as inbound links. Piggy-backing off of the authority of a more authoritative blog, will see your rankings get a quick boost.
Once yours becomes a trusted and high-quality blog, you'll be expected to link to other high-quality blogs if you want to raise the value of your blog in the eyes of the search engines. You'll definitely start seeing link back requests in your inbox once your blog has reached high-quality status.
The age-old question of content creation: short or long, succinct or expansive. Most SEO experts, and plugins, will tell you a good starting length for posts is about 300 words.
While post length should be your focus, you want to write posts that are engaging and elicit comments. Just like social media, engagement is important.
Although none of these ideas are revolutionary, they're often forgotten. So next time you're writing a post, remember these tips to help you get the most out of your blogging efforts.
Please feel free to leave a comment if you have any further ideas on how to get the best rankings from your blogging efforts, or if you have any questions. Or, if you think SEO is dead, drop a comment and explain to others why you think so. We're always open to debate.
