Day 6: SEO for Bloggers (Start a Blog in 9 Days)
The pillars of SEO, On-page vs Off-page SEO, and Keyword Optimization
Welcome to Day 6 of the Start a Blog in 9 Days Challenge.
How’s it going so far?
In case you missed the steps before:
Today we’ll talk about SEO.
It stands for Search Engine Optimization and is the actions website owners take to bring more traffic to their website and improve their visibility. The goal is ranking high in search engines for strategic terms called keywords that people are searching for and which can bring you leads.
If no one comes to your blog, you won’t help people and won’t become a full-time blogger. Luckily, anyone can learn SEO and follow its best practices so every article on your blog can gain attention and traffic.
Here are some things you need to know about SEO.
The pillars of SEO are content and links.
Writing good content is a must. All the Google algorithm updates are connected to prioritizing sites that publish quality content on a regular basis.
Beginners can do that too and it doesn’t require any technical knowledge or a budget. But there are rules that must be followed and strategies that work better than others when writing blog content.
An article of 2000 words, for example, can cover a topic much better than a 500-word blog post. So you need to spend time writing long-form content.
You also need to do some research and include data or maybe mention some studies, then link to the original source. In addition, you can embed a video and should break down the content with images. Have shorter sentences and paragraphs and break up long text with headings.
On-Page vs. Off-Page Search Engine Optimization
These are the 2 main types of SEO and you need both for best results.
On-page SEO is about making your site search engine-friendly and involves adjusting elements on your blog that will help search engines understand the intent of your content and the structure of your site better.
The actions related to on-page SEO are taken within the website.
These are things such as:
including the keyword in your title, meta description and a few times throughout the text;
having a short URL with the keyword in it;
making your content longer, unique and useful;
publishing content regularly;
updating old posts;
adding internal links between posts.
Off-page SEO, on the other hand, is about promoting your blog on the web but not from within the website, and that usually includes getting backlinks from other trusted and relevant sites as well as social media marketing.
Ranking factors related to off-page SEO include relevance, trustworthiness and authority. Two examples would be having an SSL certificate and an older domain name (the longer your blog exists online, the more search engines will boost its rankings).
Presence on social media is another starting point to build off-page SEO. The more followers, likes and shares you have, the more you improve your site’s visibility.
Keyword Optimization
In the early days of the Internet, it was easy to rank #1 for any word. You could simply write a short text and include a keyword as many times as possible. But as search engines got smarter, they now require you to put much more effort into creating the best piece on the topic so you can get to the first spot in the search results.
In addition, including your keyword in the text too many times is a bad practice called ‘keyword stuffing’ and might lead to the opposite effect of what you’re trying to achieve. That’s because including it too often makes the article seem unnatural and Google knows you’re doing this to deceive its bots and rank high.
But all Google wants you to do is write for the reader.
The best practice now is to talk about one topic and include your keyword and variations of it here and there, but to also mention its synonyms and cover other things related to it. That also means more than 1000 words of text on a single page.
Focus less on keyword optimization and more on user intent. That’s how people search for information online and what they write in the search box and is what Google keeps in mind when organizing all the data.
Ultimately, your content should answer the questions of the reader and you must use their language when describing concepts.
That’s why you need to know what terms they use to look for subjects related to your niche. And this requires basic keyword research - finding out the keywords that are in demand, which you can create a blog post about, and which don’t have too many competitive pages so you can have real chances to rank high in a short amount of time.
Today’s lesson was short and sweet, but tomorrow we continue the SEO topic by learning how to write blog posts that rank.
Also, I plan to do an SEO challenge in the future (this is just on starting a WordPress blog, so we can’t cover every other aspect of running a blogging business).
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See you tomorrow,
Lidiya