Your blog is pride and joy. It’s a stage for expressing your thoughts, a venue to exhibit your latest photography work, a place to share your industry knowledge. Whatever your passion, whatever the reason for running your own blog, there should always be room to consider SEO and driving search traffic.
So how can you apply best practice SEO techniques to your blog without compromising poetic license or the design and feel of your website? Here are some blogging and SEO tips to help you out…
SEO Tips for Your Blog
Search Engine Optimisation is a very important part of building your own blog, especially if you are self hosted. Using free blogging platforms can provide you with a ready-community, a network of similar blog owners who will become your readers over time.
With a self hosted website, you need to build your following from scratch. But how do you start a following? As well as networking, social media and online PR outreach, you also need to consider SEO.
SEO will drive organic traffic or longtail traffic to your website and as long as you supply connections to your Twitter page, your Facebook fan page or your RSS sign up area, you will be able to work on retention as well.
Here are some top SEO tips for your blog:
Submit a Google sitemap
This is SEO 1O1, not just for blog sites but for all websites. This needs to be done as soon as you start blogging, so Google acknowledges your presence.
Submitting a Google sitemap is just as simple on your blog site. In order to do this, you need to be signed up to WebMaster Tools and follow the instructions provided.
Sign up to Google Analytics
this is relatively simple process to setup. Once you have linked up your URL to Google Analytics, you can access detailed information which can provide you amazing insights into your traffic.
Find out where your traffic is coming from, which keywords are the most popular and view this data at any date range. You can view day to day or month to month, or the whole year.
Install an SEO plugin
There are several plugins available which can help you enhance your onsite SEO. Popular plugins include SEO Yoast, All In One SEO and SEO Smartlinks, and they can help you optimise your site with title tag customisation, meta descriptions and more.
Consider using keywords in your URLS
URL slugs are very important in SEO. If your URL slugs are made up of numbers (usually the date of the post), change this to the custom option or the name of your post.
Write naturally using keywords
the best piece of advice for blog writing is to write naturally. Organic keywords prevent your blog from being penalised by Google for keyword stuffing and other spammy activity. But with each blog post, remember to consider using keywords to drive Google traffic.
Amanda Revie writes for Ingenuity Digital, multilingual and international SEO specialists based in London, UK
If you are doing the blogging then you must do some SEO works..
Sitemap submission is one of the important parameter because search engine searches through your sitemap.
If you have blog with keyword name then you will get great natural search.
Thank you for giving suggestion.
Blogging without SEO is like playing tennis with a badminton racket. You can do it for a time but won’t reach a high level no matter what your skill.
This is a very basic lists and I can only recommend following your suggestions. Great article, Jane, thanks for sharing!
It’s handy to know where your visitors come from too, so something like Google Analytics is invaluable.
SEO is a must if you want your website to grow but it is just some of the battle in a rather large scheme of things needed to be done for Google. As mentioned Analytics and adwords are an invaluable tool, sure it helps you find and see your traffic but a combination of both will help provide you with some potential keywords you may not have known about that is driving traffic to your site.
Some excellent tips Amanda, I need to find more time to post regularly on my blog and update it with fresh content. Sometimes with tweeting, pinning I don’t get the time.
Thanks for the helpufl advice. SEO is very important for your online presence and people should really pay more attention to it. Cheers.
SEO is very important for successful blogging. Covers so many topics related to SEO in a clear, easy-to-follow way that makes it much easier to implement. Thanks for sharing it!!!
Success in blogging or any online bussiness need perfect s.e.o which comes with on page optimization , most of the new bloggers dont know the value of on page optimization,they just think about backlinks … about points looks basic but they are essential for every blogger should follow .. WP have a extraordinary ready made tools we can have advantage of it.. about site map when ever i change little modification immediately i will update my sitemap.xml in webmaster. thanks jane sharing a useful post…