When you own a blog, you must have the right blogging strategies.
As the saying goes, content is king and that hasn’t changed in the last decade.
Creating fresh, engaging, and optimized content is the best way to bring organic traffic and increase your sales.
Blogging is the best way to bring in organic traffic and generate more leads.
However, if you’re not doing it right, the top search engines like Google may overlook your site altogether.
The Importance of SEO for Your Blogging Strategy
Now if I talk about SEO, it’s the most important part to drive the right traffic towards your blog.
If done right, SEO can take your blog to the new heights of popularity, generating the right traffic and views on your blog.
SEO is more of an art, and you need to take care of some critical pointers while handling SEO for your blog to have the right ranking for your blog site.
While there are some people successfully acing the SEO game on their blog, a bigger number is facing difficulties in understanding the SEO and right strategies so you can assess your SEO yourself and make sure that you are not making the mistakes that are commonly made by other unsuccessful people in the game.
The most common mistakes are made by ignoring some of the small yet vital details while working on your blog SEO.
There are some pointers that you can keep in your mind to have the desired result from your SEO blogs.
The points that you need to consider and improve while handling your blog SEO strategies are:
1. Provide Answer to Popular Questions
There are several reasons that people use search engines like Google.
One of the main reasons is they’re looking for the answer to a question.
Use a public question and answer forum like Quora to see what questions people are asking related to your product or industry.
Answer the public is also another alternative to help you find your next trending blog topic.
Then, write a blog post to answer the question.
2. Do Proper Keyword Research
While you think you know the keyword or key phrase you should use, you might be surprised at the results.
Using a keyword research tool like SEMrush can help you find the keywords that are relevant and easy to rank for.
The research will enable you to choose the right keywords for your blog.
You need to keep the keywords unique to ensure the right rating for your blog.
Most people choose difficult keywords for their SEO to make them unique.
You should be doing the opposite and your keywords should be simple to ensure maximum results from SEO.
3. Use Your Keyword Enough but Not Too Much
Once you have your keyword chosen, it’s important to use it enough but not too often.
Include the keyword in your title, at least 5 times in your text (depending on length), in the URL or permalink, in at least one heading, and the meta description as well.
If you use your keyword too many times, like 10 in a small amount of text, Google will assume it is spam and rank your page lower.
The frequency of keywords matters a lot.
Do not use keywords, just once/twice.
Instead, make sure to use keywords frequently throughout your blog.
4. Link to Your Own Posts and Other Sites
While everyone knows to link to your own products is important, you should also link to other relevant pages or blog posts on your site.
While it may seem counter-intuitive, it’s a good idea to also link outside websites that are credible and support your content.
Pro Tip: Only link other people’s website to your blog post if the links are relevant to the content the user is reading. Your readers will get the impression that you have done some good research about the topic or to tell your readers where more information can be found. Either way it helps you to establish credibility with your readers that information you want them to be directed can be trusted and reliable.
5. Referencing
Referencing is the key to generate more traffic.
You should be sharing references with original links to generate optimal traffic on your blog.
Citing references in your blog post makes it look more credible, but only apply it when you feel it is really required.
While publishing facts and figures, it’s highly recommended that you source your reference and avoid any legal hassles.
Resource Article: Top Blogging Rules to Avoid Trouble
6. Optimization
The best strategy to boost your SEO ranking is to optimize your blog images to load faster and make them compatible with all the devices.
You can even download free image optimization tools to decrease the size of the images as much as possible but still keep the image quality.
For fasting image optimization you can use a free WordPress plugin called Smush.
Smush plugin for WordPress helps to compress all your images in post/blog and make your site load faster and reduce the size of your webpage.
Resource Article: Smush WordPress Plugin: Compress Image Size for Faster Loading
If you are having a hard time outranking your competition, image SEO optimization for your blog post is a clever way to outflank them.
Image optimization creates a better searcher experience, pages load faster, and offer additional opportunities for your site to rank higher.
Research studies state that people are 80% more likely to read content that includes an image and 64% more likely to remember it afterward.
Resource Article: The Ultimate List of Visual Content for More Engaging Blog Posts
7. Image Captions
Image captions you choose should be compelling, creative, and contain keywords in them.
When you run a blog, images are very important for SEO purposes and user-friendliness.
You want to have the images which are relevant to your post and make your reader’s viewer experience more enjoyable.
By inserting an image caption helps your readers know what the image is about and also the source of the image.
8. Improve Site Speed
Website loading speed has a great impact on making the first impression for your site visitors.
The faster a page is loaded, the more chances it has to get more ranking.
9. Shorten Your URL
URLs that are easy to read and short tend to get better ranking faster than long and descriptive URLs.
Using a customized short URL improves brand recognition among your users.
Shortening your blog post URLs is a great way to share your content via social media platforms, like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc.
Resource Article: Shortening Your URL for Sharing Blog Posts
To Wrap Up…
Blogging and SEO go hand-in-hand.
But it all comes down to posting quality content consistently which will help you to improve your blog SEO.
The above-mentioned blogging strategies are more like add-ons to boost your SEO.
Every blog post you write should bring about the value to your readers.
The more they enjoy reading your posts, the more shares you will get.
It’s that simple!
I hope you enjoyed reading my blog post.
Let me know your thoughts or suggestions in the comments below.
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My name is Sujoy Mukherji. I am an Internet Marketer, Entrepreneur & Professional Blogger. Founder of the Affiliate Hub Blog.