SEO For Bloggers: Here’s What You Need to Know

SEO For Bloggers: Here’s What You Need to Know 1

If you want to build a successful blog, then you must learn the knowledge of search engine optimization (SEO). Grasping the know-hows of SEO will help a lot in ranking your blog higher in the Google search results. This will give your blog more exposure and traffic, increasing your blog’s success. Here’s the key points about SEO for bloggers you need to know.

  1. Data is your friend to help you make informed decisions

Doing SEO is not a game of luck. It is a process of analysing data available to you and make the best decisions possible. You have to know how to interpret and learn from the data you collected. Google Analytics is currently the best option to collect and analyse data from your blog. It gives you valuable insights on your blog’s performance, such as how much traffic is visiting your blog, where is the traffic from, how much time visitors spend on your site, what keywords are your blog ranking for etc. This data helps you to make informed decisions and to identify improvements you can make to your blog. Another tool good for collecting data about your blog is Google Search Console, which gives you details on the technical side of your blog’s SEO. It identifies whether the pages on your blog are included in Google’s search results, and whether there are any pages with error. With more data available, you can gain insights and make informed decisions to improve your blog’s performance.

  1. Understand your site structure

Every website needs to be organized in a certain “structure”, and that includes your blog, too. A blog with a good structure helps both humans and search engine to navigate easily between the pages, making it easier to understand your blog and what it is about. When search engines can easily crawl (read) and index (include in search results) your blog, it will definitely give your blog’s SEO a boost. Technical SEO deals with this and a good site structure is a fundamental component in improving SEO. Identify and fix site errors and uploading an XML file, a file where you provide information about the site structure of your blog, is very important in improving SEO.

  1. Make your blog load fast and mobile-friendly

Mobile is now the main device that users use to browse the Internet, so it is only natural to ensure that your blog is mobile-friendly and quick to load. It improves the overall user experience and more importantly, it is one of the ranking factors for Google to show your blog higher up in the search results. In terms of SEO, a mobile-friendly blog performs better than blogs which are not. This link here helps you to check if your blog is mobile-friendly and provides tips on how to check and improve your site load speed.

  1. Speak using your audience’s words

SEO is mainly about “keywords”, words and phrases which people type in Google Search Engine to look for info. Researching and identifying the right keywords will help your blog to reach the right audience. Learn how to do keywords research to understand what people are searching for and align your blog contents to their needs. When your contents resonate and fit with what people need, it will boost your SEO performance.

  1. Create quality contents to improve SEO performance

We have heard “content is king”, but quality content is actually more important and should be the ultimate goal. Quality contents provide value to your audience and position your blog to be an authority in your niche. Quality contents get more reads, shares and have a higher chance to be linked to by external websites. These give Google a signal that your contents are valued highly by users and as a result will rank you higher, improving your SEO performance.

  1. On-Page SEO is important to mark your content as relevant

On-page SEO is a technique to optimize your individual blog pages so that each page can rank higher in the Google search results, helping your blog to earn relevant traffic. It involves optimizing your content, as well as your blog page’s HTML source code with keywords. Keywords play a huge role here to tell search engines about the topic of your content, making your content more relevant for certain searches. You can define a list of must-have keywords for your content and litter them throughout your content. You can also insert the most important keywords into your blog page’s HTML code, the title tag and the meta description. This sends a strong signal to search engines about the topic of your content, and rank you higher for that topic. It is also important to optimize your meta description to show visitors that your content answers their need, making them click into your blog.

  1. Local SEO requires a different approach

If your blog is targeting an audience of local people, you need to be aware of a few extra considerations when doing the SEO for your blog. Local SEO is similar to organic SEO, with the addition of a geographical component in your SEO efforts. Although local SEO is more suitable for local restaurants or shops, this could be useful for you if your blog is targeting a specific local audience. Here’s some easy tips you can start following, add the name of the targeted city in your blog’s HTML, such as title tag, meta description, header tag, alt attributes and put the city name in the URL.

  1. Build natural backlinks

One important way to boost your rankings on the Google search results is to have many quality backlinks to your blog. Backlinks are other third-party sites linking to you. They like your content and put a link to your content on their website. This is a strong signal for Google to know that your content is indeed a quality content. Links from high authority website is a huge benefit for your blog’s SEO. For example, a link from Forbes is worth a lot more than a link from a new website. Earning these backlinks will require quality content that people think is worth linking to. You can also earn backlinks by doing it the old-fashioned way, through marketing and PR. Some other methods include guest blogging for other bloggers, broken-link building, email outreaching to promote your content, writing testimonials, donating to non-profit organization in exchange for a link, participate in interviews etc.

  1. Forget about SEO shortcuts

When you are making efforts to build up your SEO, remember to stay away from cheating methods, known as black hat SEO. Black hat SEO is a practice against search engine guidelines and try to game the algorithm through unethical methods. You might come across these methods on the Internet, such as buying backlinks, keyword stuffing, link farms, comment spamming etc. Stay away from these as search engines algorithm today are advanced enough to detect them now! There’s no shortcut to working on SEO and it requires time to see the success. It is a long-term effort and you have to continue creating great content to gain success in SEO.

So, now you have a general idea about SEO for bloggers. It seems like there’s a lot to it, but it actually requires very little technical knowledge. Once you grasp the technical knowledge required, then it’s all about rinse-and-repeat until you see success in your SEO efforts.

Blogging is essential for any SEO efforts, and you should let your customers know the importance of blogging. Do you know they can now use “.blog” in the URL of their blog? Help them take advantage of using “.blog” in their blog’s URL and gain SEO benefits for their blog. It is now a good chance for you to promote “.blog” to prospective bloggers and WebNIC welcomes you to join us and offer “.blog”. WebNIC is a leading authority in technology services, offering one-stop online solution focused on domain wholesale service, web security wholesale, online security solution, trademark protection, and digital brand management. We are accredited registrar for ICANN, and various countries including Asia, Europe, America, Australasia, and Africa. With offices in Singapore, Malaysia, Korea, Indonesia and Taiwan, we serve 4,500+ active resellers over 70 countries. Click the green button on the bottom right of your screen to chat with us and learn more!