SEO FOR BLOGGERS & ENTREPRENEURS: THE ULTIMATE BEGINNER’S GUIDE

Search engine optimization is a big topic that can easily trip you up.

1) Write great content

Can I say this enough, ya think? Creating great content should be the hallmark of your SEO strategy. Write content that engages your readers. Make every post epic. Put your heart and soul into helping your audience, which I’m sure you already do. So we can check the box on this one, awesome blogger.

When you write great content, you’re going to check the box on a few other SEO must-do’s at the same time:

a) Write enough content / long enough

b) Well-written content

c) Include multimedia

d) Predominantly text-based

2) Use keywords that make sense

You know how we said you want to tap Google on the shoulder? This is where we start tapping. It’s time to bump up our SEO by adding researched keywords to our blog posts.

Let’s say you just used the keyword planner to brainstorm a blog topic. It kinda makes sense to use that keyword throughout your post, right?

For instance, this blog post is about SEO for bloggers, so that’s the keyword I’ll use. And all that really means is that I think that you as a blogger might search for that phrase.

Ok, so now I have my keyword SEO for bloggers, here’s what I’m going to do next (and what you should do with your keywords too). I’m going to strategically add it to my post, in these 7 places:

1) The blog title

If you only have time to change just one thing in your post, make it your blog title. You want to make sure you include your keyword in your blog title and try to keep it under 55 characters. That’s about where Google cuts it off.

2) The meta description

Meta descriptions are less about SEO and more about writing something that will grab people’s attention in the search results so they click through to your post.

But they’re still important and you want to include your keyword here too. Try to keep your meta descriptions at about 160 characters. Google will bold any keywords in your description so they stand out when people search.

3) Throughout the post itself

It’s generally pretty easy to add your keyword at the beginning with your introduction, and then again at the end with a “wrap-up” or “key takeaways” paragraph. If you can weave it in a few more times throughout your post, you’re doing great!

4) In headings (or H2 tags)

Headings are your friends. They help to organize your content and make it easy for people to follow along. See how this post has sections with headings? They help you know what I’m about to say, right? They make it easy for you to read and keep track of where you are (at least I hope they do!)

Again, don’t go crazy here, but you wherever you can, try to make your keyword part of your headings too. Don’t force it though. If it works, great. If not, leave it alone. You don’t want to look spammy or start stuffing keywords in there just because… There are plenty of other places to include your keyword.

5) Check your site speed

People like fast sites. And Google does too.

It actually penalizes sites that take a long time to load, meaning that it will not rank you as highly. So site speed is a ranking factor for Google.

To check how quickly your site loads, use Gtmetrix, Pingdom, and Google Pagespeed Insights. You want to shoot for under 5 seconds.

So what can you do to make your site faster?

speed can open up a whole can of worms, which can get pretty techie. But one thing you can do is to make sure your images are optimized and compressed. I use TinyPNG to reduce the file size of all my images, and I highly recommend trying it out.

It’s very simple to use. Just upload your image and then download the compressed version of it. Sometimes it will compress your images by a lot and other times just a little. Every little bit counts.

6) Social media

Social media doesn’t have much to do with the SEO of your actual blog posts, true. Everything we’ve covered so far has to do with what’s called “on-page SEO”, which is just a cool way of saying it’s all the SEO tweaks you make to your own posts.

Then there’s this thing called “off-page SEO” which is about getting those external links I mentioned earlier plus other things, including bookmarking and social media.

If we just look at social media, Google likes it when you’re active on social media and have a solid following, so much so that it is actually a ranking factor.

I bring it up here because I’ve found social media to be a huge traffic source. So not to get too stressed out, but worth mentioning that while you’re writing great content and making your SEO tweaks to it, why not start building a following? It’s really a win-win… Google will start to see how popular you are, plus you’ll be creating a separate traffic channel for your business. All on your own…

So there you have it! This is my ultimate guide to SEO for bloggers and entrepreneurs to help you get more traffic from Google.

Reference: https://conversionminded.com/seo-for-bloggers/