If you write great content, they will come. Ah, wouldn’t life be grand if it was so simple? The ‘field of dreams’ school of online publishing is, to a limited extent, true. If you write a great blog and post it online, share it over social media and email the link to your entire address book, people will read it. Your family and friends will even tell others to read it and some eager strangers might just share it again.
But in general, beyond the folks who would root for you if you posted tedious musings on the varying shades of beige, you’ll need to do some work to make sure your great content doesn’t get buried on page 101 of the search engine results.
So, you’re new to blogging and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) sounds like nothing more than technical blah blah… how and where do you begin to get your writing seen?
Register with the Keepers of the Keys
First off, if you have yourself a blog then you have yourself a shiny website [applause!]. In order for search engines to better recognise, index and return your pages in search results you need to build and register your sitemap with all the major players, from Google to yahoo with Bing in the middle.
This sounds daunting but it really isn’t; there are plenty of free programmes online, such as Google Webmaster Tools, to help you and in the space of minutes you’ll have announced your arrival to the Google Gods.
Keyword Research
Now your site is indexed, how about making your posts more visible to search engine users? The trick here is to think like your reader; it’s unlikely someone from Chippenham looking for information on vegan food festivals is going to type ‘vegan’ into the search box and find your Wiltshire based food blog. But if your content is filled with helpful words like festival, food, review, Wiltshire, vegan recipes, event etc., it’s far more likely that your little gem of a site will be stumbled across.
Draw up a list of anything and everything that is relevant to your article, to you as a writer and to you as a reader. Drop specific phrases that reflect your specialism into every piece you write (but only if they flow naturally) and you’re increasing your chances of climbing up the rankings, thereby enticing some lucky so-and-so to read and maybe even share your content.
To Make Friends, Be Friendly!
Make your site search-friendly. Ensure that all your links work and that your photos and videos are the right file size – nothing puts off a visitor more than a page taking an eternity to load.
Don’t limit applying your keywords to just written content – ensure that every page of your site has a title relevant to the content. Charismatic and cryptic page titles will do you no favours. While you’re at it, don’t forget that people search for images and media too, so make sure that every video, photo or file you post has a great title and relevant tags, reflecting its content accurately and with relevance to your site.
Meta data: scary, technological phrase which, for bloggers, basically translates as a short summary of your article. The meta description will appear next to the title and page link in search engines and when you share your article on social media. Try to make it succinct, relevant and intriguing and you’ll increase your chances of readers clicking said link.
Interlink between your own content wherever possible. If an article you wrote a year ago has relevance to your most recent blog, offer a link to it in the body of your work, giving the reader yet more reasons to read your masterful content.
Note: never use ‘click here’ for the title of a hyperlink – as a purveyor of words you should be able to make the title fit seamlessly into a sentence (and it looks significantly more professional).
Share and Share Alike
You’ve checked your content is visible; now make it shareable by adding social media widgets to each post, making it easy as pie for readers to let their friends know how your writing has brightened their day.
In turn, it’s nice to be sociable and share the work of other blogs you admire – if you’re lucky, you’ll become known by other bloggers and they may even link to your pages on their site! This is called outreach and is actually pretty essential to blog marketing.
Start a conversation with your readers by inviting comments and suggestions on the topic of your blog. A call to action at the end of a good post will inspire the reader to share their thoughts and the more a blog is talked about, the higher the chances of it crawling up the search result rankings.
Above all, remember that content is key. SEO is a full time job for some folks and it’s a never-ending task to keep your site up to date, relevant and accessible for readers. But if search engines are pointing people to your site only to be met by patchy content and half-formed thoughts, it’s likely your hard work will all be wasted. SEO, without exception, comes second to knocking the socks off your reader.
Do you have any SEO tips for beginner bloggers?
Claire Hovey is a writer and marketing specialist with a particular penchant for the comic side life. She will write about anything that takes her fancy, from the sublime to the ridiculous and is a proud member of the GKBC Writing Academy, which keeps her little grey cells from turning to pudding in between writing jobs.
Hello Jane,
I have been blogging for some years now and i haven’t used keywords on my blog but it looks like my keywords is coming subconsciously because most of my blog post seem to be on the first page of Google. But i do carryout other seo practices, like the ones you mentioned here.
Here is my tip(s): I do believe that writing a great blog title is also one great factor to look at, not just search for keywords and not making your title clickable. remember that you’re also writing for human, so make your post readable to avoid bounce rate.
Thanks for this lovely post Jane, it will surely help all new bloggers. Have a blessed week ahead
Hi babanature, thanks for your comment - lucky you, with your page hitting page 1 of Google! that’s great going. Is your blog about a niche subject? Clearly, Keywords come naturally to you! Claire
Hello Jane,
I understand that best SEO practices are required for your website to be in the eyes of Google. But I’m not sure that without some “budget” allocated to this SEO stuff, you will rank well.. May be if you are writing totally unique and quality articles, you may rank well after sometime. But what about average writers and those non-native English speakers. How can they rank well?
By signing up to the GKBC Academy I write for to improve their writing skills
But seriously, everyone can write well if they put enough time and effort in and if they are writing about a topic they are passionate about. It’s more than possible to rank well without an SEO budget.
It has been stressed to me that the two most important factors of SEO were both covered in your post. I feel that they could be bolded or pointed out a little bit more so as to get across their significance. The two most important aspects you can control for your site SEO are 1. Using relevant keywords in your title, try if at all possible to include your keywords in the first three words of the title. Include your Title tag manually unless you have a plugin such as Headspace2, that will do it for you after you are done writing your post. 2. I feel that this practice plays a large role in influencing google’s rankings: From the beginning of your blog, make sure to interlink every single page of your blog. After or inside every post, link to a related, or the last post. The googlebot wants to be able to follow your links seamlessly around to all the pages of your site. Personally,I have just very recently come to understand the import of this particular practice so if you take a glance at my internet marketing blog (please find in next comment as this one is repeatedly saying I have too many urls even though I only have one), you will not yet find the majority of the content interlinked. But this process is in the works, let me assure you :). I hope this helps, feel free to let me know if you agree with the importance of these two practices.
If you have continued to this comment to find my internet marketing blog (Once again it says I am including two many urls. If it is not permissible to include anchor text in any comments then you should remove the content below the comment form that states that you can use html tags such as a href etc., This is quite misleading.) thank you! And I hope to see you on this site, or mine, or even yours sometime soon.
Hi Nicholas, thanks for sharing your comments - I’ve bookmarked your page and am looking forward to taking a look! Claire
Hi Jane,
Some great data considered here and could be actually useful for the newbies to SEO although this is only touching the surface i look ahead to reading a follow on to this post with other SEO associated best practices.
SEO can be complex at times. The rudimentary actually aren’t that entire complex though. It’s the details that get perplexing. The good report is most of us don’t really need to spend too much time in the details. Generally if you cover the basics you’ll be in pretty good form overall.
Thanks - this was only meant to be a very basic introduction for bloggers who know nothing about SEO. You can go into more detail if you want, but I think with these basics covered any good, passionate, hard-working blogger can rank well.
Being honest, I think sharing plays an important role in branding. The network which you are talking about plays an important role in building a blog and then making money out of it.
I have never been a great fan of keyword research, because once you have followers and readers, they literally read to whatever you write, just ask them if they want you to cover some post and just write on it. That works better than any of the keyword research strategy.
I agree, you should always listen to your readers. But as a newbie, if you’re struggling for ideas then keyword research is a good way to discover potential topics that people are searching for.
Unique and people targeted content enriched with long tail keywords + Schedule Posting + Proper White hat SEO should be the routine of any blogger.
SEO is not an easy world, it’s a broad term and a lot of thing to study when entering this marketing.
SEO is really important for newbie bloggers. Google is making it tougher for bloggers to understand SEO by continuously changing its algorithms. But some basic SEO strategies always work. Keyword Research and Good quality backlinks are among such strategies.
Thanks for sharing this informative post, Jane.
It’s also important to note that a lot of bloggers outside of the blogging/marketing sphere (fashion bloggers for example) become massively successful without ever understanding or trying SEO. Google can change its algorithms but good content will always be good content, and in turn popular, well-ranking content.
This is a nice succinct article on a vast and confusing subject. After 6 months, I am still trying to get my blog on google page 1. If only there were a magic bullet!
Hi,
This is a great beginner guide to SEO. One of the best ways to drive tons of traffic to your site is creating a catchy title. I always try to create a great way to win over more traffic. SEO is very crucial for your site success. It does take time to craft SEO.
Good point - a catchy title makes more people click on it, which can benefit your rankings (if you’re at position 2 but receiving more clicks than the blog at position 1 due to your catchy title, Google will take notice!)
Useful Post Indeed ..!
I saw this Article Yesterday but due to Shortage of time i could not read it . Today I’vae read it. It’s really Useful Post for me ! I’ve Start my Site 3 Weeks Ago & I think This Post Is very useful to being a Successful Blogger. The more we can make our site popular with these tips.
I have never Share my Post to Social Media but now you have made me understand about this Useful Information ! Thank you Jane for giving that much Good Opportunity
Good post to understand basic terms of blogging and attracting traffic to your website. As a hobby blogger I like to write what ever I like and got good amount of visitors but with these tips I can double my traffic. Thanks for writing these.
Nice post to understand the SEO concepts Jane
As you told, keyword research is imperative and over optimization is bad.
I am focusing mainly on the needs of the visitors on my blog but used to do the basic optimization for search engines. It helps me to get good SERP.
Thanks for presenting this useful post for us
Keyword research plays a very important role in SEO. If a beginner learns to find out proper keywords, then there won’t be anything else to learn as finding out a great keyword is like doing 70% of the SEO and the other 30% can be compensated by Off-page techniques like guest posts or blog commenting.
You don’t even really need to do guest posting in fact - it’s beneficial if you have time, but if your blog is good enough then people will link to your articles themselves without you having to do it yourself!
I completely agree with you on that point too.
But when you are just starting out, not many bloggers will know you are to create a network of friends you need to build some great relationships.
And we all know that guest posting is a great way to build new relationships in the online world.
A little push in the beginning won’t harm us in any way and its completely worth all the time spent.
What say?
I guess so. If you guest post on the right websites - ‘proper’ blogs, not sites set up purely to host articles for SEO - it can be a good way to get your name out there.
I don’t focus on SEO anymore and it feels much better now that I don’t depend on Google. I consider the traffic that comes from search engines as a bonus
Yes I don’t think it’s necessary to do SEO at all to be a successful blogger, but as a newbie it can help you start to draw in traffic whilst your site is still relatively hidden and unknown to the world.
Few months ago i cared a lot about Search Engines but now i write for my readers. I write what my readers expect from me and do a little bit search engine optimization to get some extra traffic
Definitely the way to do it - all the SEO in the world won’t help you if you’re not giving the readers what they want, because you’ll end up with a high bounce rate that’s bad for rankings.
Hey Jane,
These are great tips and a good reminder.
I just would like to say that registering your sitemap to the search engines, (submitting your link to be crawled by the search engines) is a bad idea,
if you read the notice on the pages it says it would take 4 to 5 weeks for the search engines to crawl your link,
your website will be queued in a long list, bad move,
instead you need to find yourself a high page ranked website ( usually they are crawled daily by the search engines)
and submit a guest post there with your link or maybe comment there, or submit an article or anything,
these sites gets crawled daily and so your web will be included in the search engines in less than 24 hours instead of having to wait 4 to 5 weeks just get listed!
Many thanks and Best wishes!
That’s another way to do it, but it depends in how much of a rush you are. If you start a blog on Blogspot, because it’s owned by Google it will get crawled very quickly.
Here is my tip(s): I do believe that writing a great blog title is also one great factor to look at, not just search for keywords and not making your title clickable. remember that you’re also writing for human, so make your post readable to avoid bounce rate.
Hi Jane!!!
Nice post but don’t you think. These all tips & points are same & common with another articles. I have ready many article best guide for SEO Articles & most of tips & point be same in very post like Share and Share Alike, Keyword Research & To Make Friends but even. SEO is hard because due to Google latest updates. Ranking of website & Blogs are falling down.
The tips are the same because they’re the right ones
The small details in SEO will change based on Google algorithms but the very basics will always stay the same, at least for years to come.
I have recently made a new blog and still working to get traffic to m blog. I will surely look after your points so tha t i could easily move up in this and SEO ffield. II m still learning all techniques of Link building.
I’m so pleased this article has got such a great response! I’ve learned as much from the comments as I hope a beginner will get from the post - so snappy titles are essential, keywords are a must and don’t forget to write for the reader? It’s brilliant to hear your views and blogging experiences so please, keep them coming! Thanks all. Claire
Keyword research is very important, and having a strong network in your niche is also important because it helps in near future when you seriously move into ranking for a specific term.
Thanks for sharing valuable stuff and information here.
It was a good documentation for all bloggers who have just started, will help them to concentrate why SEO is so important for blogging.
I think any blogger just starting out should also look at social media as a key part of the SEO strategy.
Build up a following by being pro active will get your content noticed quicker and, if your content is good, will result in more people linking to you which will drive you up the SERP’s
Hi Jane,
thanks for sharing a detailed and informative post. these all above mentioned beginner bloggers seo guide are great. Keyword Research is one of the most important thing to be nice on the search engine. thanks again for this amazing post……!!
Great tips indeed,seo is most important to any kind of blogger.Keyword research and friendly behavior and in deepth artical writing is very important in seo. thank you for sharing such great tips.
I am a blogger and looking forward for new updates, tips, tricks to follow in blogging from this website. Thanks for sharing!
I tried ScribeContent before and has some good results. It takes the guess work out of SEO Optimization.