Lye’s note: I was on a short vacation for the last few days. After hours on the road, i don’t have the energy to blog but i have prepared a guest post for you. This post is courtesy of the guest post king Onibalusi Bamidele. When Oni contributes a post, you know it sure to be good stuff. I am grateful to Oni for the contribution of this post. Thanks Oni.
When trying to build a successful blog you need to realize the importance of getting traffic and you also need to know that search engine traffic is one of the most important types of traffic you can get to a blog.
I’ve never really took SEO seriously as a blogger but I decided to analyze my blog traffic lately and I noticed that even without me doing any SEO, Google is the single top referring site to my blog and that my traffic from search engines is increasing every month without me lifting a finger – I now asked myself, what would happen if I decide to put more efforts into making my blog more search engine friendly?
This post will be explaining some of the most critical aspects of SEO you must consider as a blogger if you really want to get great traffic from the search engines.
Improve Your Site Speed
Do you know that the speed of your site is one of the most important factors considered by the search engines when trying to rank your content?
The reason for this is that the best search engines in the world today have only one aim, and that aim is to serve their users so they take a lot of factors into consideration. We as readers find blogs that are very slow annoying and if we’ve spent a lot of time on a particular blog but still find it difficult to access it we will give up on it.
Try to optimize your site not only for the search engines but for your users by ensuring you make it as fast as possible. This might need you to talk to your host about it, and if you don’t find their answer satisfactory the best thing to do might be to switch to a better host.
Improve Your Link Structure
Even though search engines love great content and take a lot of factors into consideration before ranking your website they won’t be able to rank your content if they can’t find it so that is why it is very important to focus on improving the link structure of your blog so that your content will be easy to find and rank by the search engines.
When trying to improve your blog’s link structure the main question you have to ask yourself is how easy is it for readers to find my content? If readers find it very easy to find both your old and new content then there won’t be a problem with the search engines finding it.
Three important things you might want to improve on are:
- Having a sitemap
- Having an archive page
- Interlinking your blog posts
Once you give the above three things priority it will be easier for both your readers and the search engines to find and enjoy your content.
Improve Your Keyword Usage
I’m not trying to tell you to be spamming your blog posts with keywords or to neglect the importance of your readers while trying to write your blog posts. After all, since it is people who will be reading your blog posts there is no point in writing a post that ranks in the search engines when people won’t enjoy it.
It is important for you to ensure that you have the right keyword balance between your post title and your post content. For example, search engines will only rank your content for a particular keyword if they think it is related to that keyword and the best way to let them know that your content is related to a particular keyword is by using the right keywords in your post and its title.
Focus on Increasing Your Domain Authority
One major thing about my blog nowadays is that whenever I write a blog post I find it ranking for my desired keyword the day I wrote it without me lifting a finger. The only reason for this is that the search engines see my blog as an authority to some extent.
One of the best ways to ensure you easily rank for your desired keywords and maintain it is by focusing your efforts on improving your domain authority. The only way to do this is by focusing on building more quality backlinks to your blog homepage.
Improve Your Link Profile
Links control the web and the best way to be ranking for your desired keywords is by building the right backlinks but you also have to realize that everything has to be done with care.
Search engines take a look at the links pointing to your blog posts to see if there is an attempt to game their system and once they notice you’re doing something unethical you will end up paying for it dearly. The best thing to do to avoid problems with the search engines as far as link building is concerned is to make your link profile as natural as possible. This means you should not build a lot of backlinks today and stop tomorrow and you should also not buy unethical links against the search engines’ will.
As long as your link building profile looks natural, you would never have any problems with the search engines.
Bio: Onibalusi Bamidele is a young blogger who helps you learn how to market a blog – you can also read his article on how to get traffic to your blog.
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Hi Oni
Great to see you here on Lye’s blog. Really informative post Oni that is well written and easy to read.
So much is written about SEO and often by people who complicate it. Thanks for sharing your own experiences. Appreciated.
Patricia Perth Australia
I’m really glad you enjoyed reading the post Patricia and I’m even glad you found it easy to digest.
Thanks a lot for the awesome comment!
Onibalusi Bamidele recently posted..Alibaba Reach 1 Million UK Members [INFOGRAPHIC]
SEO is an important aspect of blogging and hence it should not be underestimated, and this is where many people commit the mistake. Now, apart from that- its a learning process, so you can’t expect yourself to be the Einstein in just one day!
Maria Pavel recently posted..CNA Training In Hawaii
That’s right Maria! SEO is a process that takes a lot time and there’s a need to understand that there’s nothing called instant results.
Onibalusi Bamidele recently posted..Alibaba Reach 1 Million UK Members [INFOGRAPHIC]
SEO is a big factor we have to consider as a blogger because it is important for our blogs… Traffic is also important for the success of the blogs posted…
Evan Griffin recently posted..Top 3 Fat Loss Tips for Men
I’m glad you agreed Evan
Onibalusi Bamidele recently posted..Alibaba Reach 1 Million UK Members [INFOGRAPHIC]
Twitter: AdamPaudyal
Oni!
I am glad you mentioned about talking to the web host. Just recently I called mine up and asked them about my site speed. And sure enough, they upgraded my regular server to a grid server, without any extra cost. This significantly increased the speed of my site.
Adam recently posted..7 Key Elements That Will Put Your Blog Into A Total Success Frenzy.
Backlinking and authority go hand in hand from an SEO standpoint, simply because the more authority blogs and sites where you’ve built up a link presence. the search engines are going to notice. The way you solidify your reputation is with the human element of networking.
Delena
Delena Silverfox recently posted..Medifocus Coupon Code
Nice post, from my point of view SEO is the very important part for any website because a perfect SEO knows very well how he can achieve no-1 page rank in Google, beside that this is not an easy work to do .
Great tips Onibalusi,
as usual, you have made some great points right in your blog here. Thanks for sharing.
Michael Chibuzor recently posted..31 Smart Ways To Make $100 From The Internet Everyday
I guess it depends on the keyword. Authority can get you ranking fast if the competition is non existent, but if you try to rank for a difficult keyword the best thing you’ll get is a fast indexing from Google.
Amit recently posted..Forklift Training Schools
SEO is an important task about doing the traffic for your website. To have an effective SEO, one should follow rules and guide that will bring you to the top. SEO should be handle with care.
Ron recently posted..Gynecomastia Symptoms
It’s unbelievable how many people ignore the sitemap. All you needs to do is install a small plugin and you’re good to go.
Richard recently posted..Warranty on the Paint Zoom Sprayer
At first SEO was a complicated subject matter and now its not complicated anymore but it sure is vast and a field which will take years to master it. Blogs and websites in the absence of SEO works will remain stagnant in one place.
Brandon Patton recently posted..Effective Online Real Estate Search
Hey Oni, very nice post buddy
I’ve participated in SEO and Internet marketing for some times now and I know that SEO is one of the most effective and systematic ways to drive traffic back to our sites.
But in order to make it work, we have to understand the basics and be consistent. Your post here offers the first half of the cake and I appreciate that!
Thanks for sharing and have a nice day!
Duy.
Twitter: jasmin
Hmm the site-speed seems to be an important factor. But I see so many very very slow websites, that are ranking very well, that sometimes I think its not that important, as google wants us to believe. In my opinion authority and trust are the number 1 factors today.
Jasmin
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Twitter: hamzahqutub89
Just recently read in a book that internal linking can do wonders for SEO and It’s my personal experience that this is particularly ignored by webmasters.The author gave the example of amazon and wikipedia.He mentioned that if you just type the name of a book most probably the first link you will see in SERP is the amazon buy page for that title .And then he went on to explain how amazon has a wonderful internal linking structure.Can you please advice more on internal linking when it comes to WordPress blogs?
Very well said, there you have it say Lye. Search Engines are most prefer to a great content in ranking such website or blog. I learn some things here and I truly appreciate it. Thanks!
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