SEO for blogs – first steps

SEO for blogs is the first thing you should think about when writing a post. It is the best way to drive traffic to your website. Moreover, it is a lot less expensive than spending money on ads. You just need to know some techniques and use appropriate tools.

What is SEO for blogs

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, which means taking a series of actions that are aiming to increase online visibility of a site in the search engine (mostly Google). SEO for blogs starts as early as choosing the subject of a post based on the keyword research.

Keyword Research

To perform keyword research you can use a free tool called Keywords Everywhere. It is an Extension to Google Chrome or Firefox which will allow you to check search volumes, competition, and CPC for selected keyword phrase.  You have to remember that if you use obvious keywords you will face higher competition. This means that your post will not get high in the ranks, because there are much bigger sites that are already ranked for that phrase. And this may result in no traffic coming to your site.  Therefor you may want to try to look for long-tail variations of your selected keyword phrase because they will for sure be less popular and you’ll have better chances to rank higher. My general advice is to look for phrases that have high amount of search volume and low level of competition.

Valuable content

What Google is looking for is useful and credible content. So it is crucial that your posts are delivering some value to the readers. Moreover, if your text is interesting users will want to share it on social media platforms which naturally improves yours SEO ranks.
Most of the time the valueble content is content that is serving the needs of your audience. That means giving answer to their issues and problems.
Don’t forget to enable your readers an easy way to share your content by installing the social plugins.

Utilization of keyword phrases

Once you’ve selected your keyword phrases, you have to make sure that you use them throughout the text. It is also important to include the keyword phrase in the title of the article as well as in headings and subheadings. Always keep in mind that you should not overdo with the keywords density because it may become irritating for your readers.

Length of the text

Most SEO tools recommend texts with at least 300 words, but apparently, Google favors texts that are over 2 000 words. But of course, not all your blog posts have to be that long. In my opinion, if you keep a good proportion of shorter texts (+300 words) and longer texts (2000+) your positioning on Google should be fine.

Remember about links

Using links to other sites, especially big and credible sites influences positively your SEO rank. You shouldn’t also be afraid to link to other blogs because linking to valuable content is positively perceived by the Google Algorithm.

Another thing you should not forget about is to use internal links, which you can do quite easily by linking to your other posts. The perfect situation is when you also have the backlinks, meaning that other sites are linking to your article.

Use SEO plugins

I understand that it all may sound a little bit complicated especially, if you’ve just created your site. Therefore I recommend you to use SEO plugins that will make sure that you remember about all mentioned above points. There are a number of plugins that help you to make the best of your text in terms of SEO, one of them is definitely Yoast SEO, one of the most popular among SEO plugins. It leads you step by step allowing to improve your text. With Yoast SEO you are able to establish an optimal SEO title and description and set the focus keyword. With the free version of this plugin, you’re able to set one keyword phrase for the texts. If you want to set more phrases you would have to go for the paid version. But in my opinion for the start it is enough to work with the free version. At least until you get more used to SEO and editing your content based on the main rules.

SEO for blogs – first steps

1. Perform Keyword research
2. Assure valuable content
3. Write long enough text
4. Utilize keyword phrases
5. Remember about links
6. Use SEO plugin

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