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Whether your blog is political or light-hearted, article-focused or image led, every blog needs visitors, because without visitors, your blog is just a space for aimless musings. Attracting a reliable and regular readership can turn your blog into a place of thought-leadership, and of course, the more hits you get, the higher your advertising revenues will be.
But attracting visitors can often feel like a minefield. When you’re competing against an estimated 156 million blogs (according to BlogPulse), how can you pluck random followers out of thin air? Well, it’s not as hard as it first may seem.
A few simple SEO tweaks can be the passport to a whole family of new readers. The majority of blog visitors start out as ‘wandering traffic’, searchers that stumble upon a blog by accident, through keyword searches or via other social media sources. Fundamentally, these visitors are already interested in the topic you are talking about – they are blog-lovers up for grabs.
The key is to make sure it’s your blog they wander onto, and getting your blog seen, let alone read, has become as important as the content it includes.
But don’t panic, we’re not talking about a strategic, multi-layered plan of attack. Just a little SEO awareness and good old-fashioned patience is the key to happy blogging. Here are 10 top SEO tips for all bloggers:
1. Keywords: Make the most of Google’s free Adwords keyword tool to identify how people are searching for topics relevant to your blog. Look at your subject like an outsider. Incorporate those keywords with high search traffic but relatively low competition into headings, titles, URLs, anchor text and content. For instance, if your blog is on self-publishing, you might consider working in keywords such as ‘self publish book’, ‘self publishing company’ and ‘how to publish’.
2. Headings & Titles: Keep headings and titles catchy to attract attention – but don’t forget your SEO strategy. Keywords in headings and titles help searchers to find your website and, more importantly, help search engines to rank it.
3. URLs: Using keywords in URLs increases your blog’s search potential. Opting for words over numbers or characters heightens your chances of being found.
4. Categories: These are fundamental to a blog’s organization, allowing visitors to navigate your blog as it expands. Use keywords and name your categories according to what people search for.
5. Tag Cloud: Same benefits as categories. Be sure to tag your posts with keywords relevant to its subject (for instance, for a post on publishing poetry, tags may include ‘self publishing poetry’, ‘publish poetry online’, etc). Your tag cloud will accumulate all your tags, with those most frequently used showing up the largest, allowing visitors to get a quick visual idea of the type of content they’ll find on your blog, and to click directly through to the content that’s relevant to them.
6. Internal Links: Create links between your blog posts, using keywords to help visitors find other related blog content and increase your page-clicks – the aim is to keep people reading!
7. Inbound (external) Links: Make the most of your blogging community – be active! Link to your blogging colleagues, and request links in return – Google looks at who is linking to your site when it judges your authority and relevance. You can also gain back-links by writing guest-posts and leaving comments and reviews, encouraging visitors to stop by your blog and making you an active part of the blogging world.
8. Social Media: Whenever you write a new blog post, shout about it! Use other social media (Twitter, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon) to broadcast it. Getting links to your blog sent around on Twitter will increase the likelihood of your post showing up in real-time search.
9: Site Map: The key to helping visitors around your blog, a site map also allows search engine spiders to index your blog much more quickly.
10. Images, Graphics and Flash: Images and video content make for a user-friendly blog, but be sure to use low-res images to minimize loading speeds, and avoid Flash where possible, as it can be slow to load, and keywords within Flash files cannot be read by search engine spiders.
That said, you must always remember the visitor – if your blog reads like a list of SEO keywords, they’ll quickly lose patience. Until writing optimized content becomes second-nature, write for your reader first and optimize later. Happy blogging!
About the author
Christian Arno is the founder of global translation agency Lingo24, experts in foreign language internet marketing. Launched in 2001, Lingo24 now has over 150 employees spanning four continents and clients in over sixty countries. In the past twelve months, they have translated over forty million words for businesses in every industry sector and their turnover for 2010 was $8m. Follow Lingo24 on Twitter: @Lingo24.
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{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
tag cloud , categories , and much more shared here is really amazing , thanks for the post
all the points are very useful and best. but they needs to learn and get full grip our them to rank high through SEO.
First and foremost are the keywords, it is very important to know which keywords users are searching most of the time. The social media also works effectively for users from every profession but the way it works for bloggers is amazing. Its great to see my favorite bloggers updating everyone through sites like twitter and facebook.
A very resourceful post! I think maybe you are an expert in SEO tips. Thanks for sharing so much information with us.
Twitter: WebTrafficCafe
Of course, tag cloud is entirely different from tags – I am sure you meant to say tags.
All tag clouds do is leak your PR to a bunch of useless pages.
Ana
Ana recently posted..How to Build an Email List 101
Twitter: larryrivera
Hi Ana, always great to see you!
I just did a google search and it does seem many folks say using tag clouds are bad. There are a few people who say using tag clouds with relevant keywords are useful.
I think the problem with using tag clouds is lots of people who use tag clouds clutter it with empty keywords that have no relevance at all. That and I am not sure how spiders look at flash based tag clouds.
Twitter: WebTrafficCafe
That’s exactly right, Larry.
If you don’t mind me sharing a couple of links:
http://www.trafficgenerationcafe.com/google-tag-clouds/ (about tag clouds)
http://www.trafficgenerationcafe.com/blog-tags-seo/ (all about tags)
Ana
Ana recently posted..Deep Linking: How To Rank Well For Your Inner Pages
Twitter: larryrivera
Thanks!
Those are all the essentials for SEO for sure! Luckily for us wordpress users we can take advantage of plugins like All In one seo that can take most of the hard on page seo work out of the way for us and let us get to the heart of the content! Offcourse sometimes automated SEO isnt the best replacement for manually researched keywords that will work.
-Jean
Good article. Correct, but i one thing i think you failed to mentions is that the search engines weight your performance based on a few factors. Sure all the things you wrote about help your SEO. However, i dont think you talked about inbound (external) links enough. They are by far the most important factor at current time.
I am perhaps slightly scares some of the readers will read this and have a list of things to do to improve there SEO but be unaware what will help what amount.
Good post though, enjoyable read.
These great list for SEO strategies used in blogs. The sad truth is… not actually all are using all of these tips for their blogs. Some actually tend to focus on one aspect for example outbound linking than inbound linking because of different beliefs or maybe time consuming if they will consider all of these. But one thing is for sure, all of these tips can be very helpful for a blog owner to succeed.
Maria recently posted..Certified Nursing Assistant Salary
Twitter: larryrivera
Hi Maria, sadly you are correct there are a lot of lazy people out there…
Haha yeah! And I’m one of those lazy people sometimes because I can feel that my mind is processing too much information! Anyway, if I can’t memorize all these points, I could simply save this in a notepad and check it from to time or save it in my email anyway, as what I always did with my other stuffs… Thanks again!
Maria recently posted..How To Become A CNA Instructor
I liked the lines that in order to get targeted search engine traffic I don’t have to be an SEO expert nor take any courses in search engine optimization but just follow your tips. Reading this post has made me realize that article submission tactics is not difficult at all. Thanks for all the motivating words, I found this post very helpful.
Great checklist for anyone doing SEO – if you are really on top of the basics, I recommend WordPress. There are a few things that are not so straightforward and take a while to set up but once you get there, it’s so SEO friendly. Takes a lot of work out of SEO.
Tom recently posted..White Hat and Black Hat SEO
Twitter: threelinesseo
I know when I am writing blogs, after the hard work of the writing is done it is hard to get the modivation to go through the SEO process for the article. It does definitely have great benefits and I recommend anyone writing to just put in the extra few minutes to your posts.
This is good solid advice. So true about writing a post and then “shouting about it”. Just linking to it in another blog site, web page, or wherever will help keep that lonely little post alive and kicking in Google’s eyes. Otherwise, it will just sink into “blog post oblivion”.
Twitter: PrivateCapNW
I’m very new to building and maintaining a website and I’ve been trying to learn as much as I can about SEO. This is a very helpful site that I will use as a reference. Thanks for sharing the list.
Jeff | Commercial Loans recently posted..Our First Hard Money Blog Post