Every blogger is looking for the secret sauce. The perfect combination of great content, engaged readers and steady traffic. While we totally understand that blogging is more than a numbers game, everyone wants more eyes in front of their great content. And why shouldn’t you?! You spend hours crafting informative, useful and entertaining posts, people should know about it!
But getting traffic is a daunting task and there’s so much information in cyberspace about how to go about getting it. Organic traffic from search engines is a great (and often overlooked) way to get readers to your blog. Google, Yahoo and Bing serve results to searchers looking for information and rank them according to relevance to what a searcher is looking for. By creating a useful post and optimizing it, your blog can appear at the top of the ranks and get the traffic your content deserves.
Here’s the IFB Primer on how to optimize your content and strut to the top of the Google ranks!
Creating a great blog post trumps SEO, shh don’t tell anyone! But seriously crafting a great, resourceful article that answers your readers problems/questions/concerns should be your first priority. By writing a rich post full of useful links and how-to information will get you noticed by Google right away, not to mention help your readers and have them coming back for more!
Keyword Research is your Friend
With your brilliant idea in tow, the first step to the SEO process is Keyword Research. Finding relevant key phrases that people are searching are going to anchor your article and help Google rank your content for the right terms. Using the Google Keyword Tool, you can type in keywords and get the Global (the world) and Local (US) monthly search volume.
*Insider tip*: Change the match type to ‘Exact’ to get more accurate search volume
Find the keywords that have substantial search volume with medium to low competition. That’s your sweet spot and make sure they make sense and can be easily integrated into your post.
Optimize Important Elements
SEO is not about stuffing the phrase “ugg boots” all over your blog, contrary to the emails you may get. There is an art to seamlessly integrating keywords into your content while still preserving your voice and quality. In optimizing your content, there are some key elements to keep in mind.
* Insider tip*: For WordPress.org users, the All In One SEO pack plugin makes all of these fields accessible. Download it now!
Title Tag
The title tag is easily the most important element on your page. It is the listing that search engines use in your ranking, so optimizing it helps searchers clickthrough to your blog. Make sure to include your targeted keyword here
Post Heading
The title you give your post is the second most important element because for most blog templates it is the main heading or <H1> on the page. Anything tagged as an <H1> is given more weight with the engines and it’s key to have your targeted phrase in the heading.
Content
Optimizing your actual blog post is extremely important. Use your targeted keyword in your post, but remember not to keyword stuff and use it where it is relevant and sounds natural. Keep readers in mind first, SEO second.
Meta Description
Like the title tag, Google uses the meta description in it’s results pages. Create a short and snappy teaser description of your post and be sure to include your targeted phrase and a few variations.
Meta Keywords
While some argue the importance of meta keywords, it’s still pretty standard to include them. Tag your post with your targeted keywords and relevant variations.
Get Links
The last and most critical piece to SEO is link building. Links to your content are like votes in the Google popularity contest. The more authoritative sites that link to your blog post, the more Google sees you as an authority. There are many ways to build links, but the easiest way is to create robust, resourceful posts that your readers will find invaluable.
*Insider Tip*: Use Google Webmasters Tools along with Google Analytics to get a more holistic view of which sites are linking to your site.
While this is just the beginning of the SEO ladder, these are some tried and true tactics to get you started in your quest for search domination!
What else would you like to know about SEO?
So bad in all those technical stuff! I should buy one of those book, like “…. for dummies”
Thank for this post. I was looking for something as simple and easy to understand as this post!
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