Something you must continuously work at in order to improve your blog’s search engine rankings is SEO, or search engine optimization. This is very important and vital to your website if you want it to become successful. Most people will probably get to your site through a Google search or a different search engine, so it’s ultimately your job to make it easier for these people find you. Follow these 5 blog SEO tips and you should see results within weeks if not days with improved search engine traffic.
1. Implement long tail keywords into your posts
Long tail keywords are basically search terms that are quite lengthy. For example, one may look for an SEO consulting service in his local area and type ‘SEO consulting service new jersey’ in order to find the desired results. You can monitor your success with these long keywords by using Google Analytics to see what searchers are typing in the search engine and how they got to your page. Long tail keywords have proven to be very successful for bloggers and niche marketers alike. Even Google’s Matt Cutts has mentioned before that long tail keywords can be effective in getting traffic to your website and new visitors.
2. Get links, backlinks, and even more links
You will gain serious strength over your competitors by getting more links to your website. Link building is just that — a building process that takes time. It’s usually better to get a link that relates to your category or market. Writing good content in the form of top 10 lists can lead to your site being linked in other blogs or even forwarded through email between acquaintances. A decent way to get links is to write product reviews as the advertiser is interested in selling their product.
3. Include low competition keywords in your blog title
It is evident that if you choose low competition keywords in your niche, you are likely to see traffic and results to your blog sooner than later. The keywords with high competition almost always have a serious surge of web traffic, but are extremely hard to target. Again, if you want your blog to be seen, you should aim for keywords with very little competition. With little optimization and a few links, you could reach the first page of Google for your desired keyword in a relatively short period of time. You can use WordTracker to research popular keywords and monthly stats, but the truth is that none can match the reliable data that the Google Adwords Keyword Tool provides.
4. Use SEO plugins to enhance your on page SEO
I’m a fiend when it comes to SEO plugins or WordPress plugins period. I’ve used many over the years but I’ll only mention the most effective ones. The plugin SEO SearchTerms Tagging has helped me greatly in getting more traffic from search engines. What this plugin does is basically copy the user’s search term (keyword they used to get to your page) and places it on the bottom of the page. Over a period of time, a certain post will collect a bunch of search terms and therefore strengthen your on page SEO. There’s also an option to convert these terms to tags which is highly recommended. SEO Smart Links is a smart plugin that helps you link your posts internally by recognizing similar keywords. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin is self explanatory — it lists a few posts which are related to the one you’re currently viewing. Finally, you may have to buy this plugin, but WP-Pressor is well worth the money. It tells you everything from keyword density, to what type of titles you are missing, and so on. What I love about it is the scoring system based on percentages that shows you how well optimized you are for that certain keyword.
5. Submit your posts to popular social bookmarking sites
With so many social bookmarking sites, it’s virtually impossible to feed content to all of them, but you can focus on the more popular sites. Sites like Delicious, Digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Google+, and Facebook are worth your time. Submitting your posts to these sites has a few benefits; you will get exposure, links, and possibly even subscribers. Get enough link loving from these social gurus and you will eventually improve your blog’s PageRank. Achieving a PageRank has been difficult for many bloggers lately and can take up to 3 years if you don’t take SEO steps towards the right path!
With careful planning and sincere dedication to your blog, you should be able to better you search engine ranking. I hope you enjoyed these blog SEO tips as I’m sure I’ll make another update sometime in the future due to Google’s changing algorithms.