SEO tip blog posts are everywhere and there’s a good reason why. Search engine traffic can be the absolute jackpot when it comes to getting regular traffic to your blog. When you get it right, it can lead to regular traffic coming to your website in a passive way every single day. Fantastic news for that evergreen content.
I have a handful of posts that continually do well in search. Some of these posts are a few years old and still continue to be the top drivers of traffic to my blog. Getting a steady stream of traffic to your website is fantastic as it means you don’t need to rely on creating new content all the time to keep your traffic high, especially if you have advert platforms such as Adsense to monetise your blog.
Though you can find a Mississauga SEO Expert to help guide you in the quest for the best search engine optimisation practices, you can also teach yourself a few ticks to rank top in search.
For those of you that have no idea what I’m talking about, SEO stands for search engine optimisation. In short, this means implementing techniques into your content and website to help you show up on the first page of Google.
The easiest way to explain it is to imagine you have a blog post that gives people advice on how to make money blogging. When you write that blog post, you want to follow a few strategies so when people search ‘make money blogging’ or something similar – your blog shows up high in the results.
There’s plenty of advice out there, like on this website, but let’s look into some things we can start doing now.
What you should do to help improve your SEO.
Write longer content.
Google favours longer content over thin content. But how long should that content be? Well, the average word counts for the top 10 returned results is 2000 words. One of my blog posts that gets the most traffic from search has 1150 words. My second most popular post in search has 1000. So take from that what you will.
I googled ‘SEO tips for bloggers’ and here’s the word count for the top 4 posts:
- 1st: 2599
- 2nd 3137
- 3rd: 1515
- 4th: 1254
It’s a toughy really because for so long the general advice was to make your content short and snappy. Internet users have short attention spans, they want to come to your article, get what they need and leave. But longtail content is the most shareable and is the best for SEO.
Google wants people to find exactly what they need on one page, a more comprehensive article on any given topic is more likely to give that to the users the next experience.
That being said, you do not want to write words just for the sake of writing words. Your content has to be engaging and useful to encourage more time on page and more click-throughs.
If your article gets lots of views, but people are leaving the page after a few seconds – that’s a massive red flag to Google that the article isn’t great quality. Google wants to remain the top search engine, which means it needs to give the best results to searchers to enhance user experience.
If you’re worried that long content will turn your readers off, remember to avoid blocks of text by using short paragraphs, images, bullet points and headers to make it easier for people to read and make it easier for them to scan the page to find the exact information they want.
Use keywords correctly.
Keywords keywords keywords. That’s probably the first thing that comes to mind when you think of SEO. If you don’t use keywords correctly, you could end up actually damaging your blogs SEO.
The most important thing to remember: DO NOT KEYWORD STUFF! If you want to rank high for a particular keyword, it can be tempting to try and stuff it into your post as much as possible. The trouble is, it makes the post awkward to read and doesn’t sound natural.
Use a variety of similar keywords that relate to each other, rather than using the same words over and over. Also, ensure you don’t use highly competitive keywords. Make it specific and aim for long tail keywords.
For example, if you are targeting a post on SEO tips, you might want to target keywords such as:
- SEO tips for bloggers
- Latest SEO tips
- SEO tips for WordPress
- Blogging and SEO tips
- SEO tips and best practices
If you run a business that offers a service or product and is writing to try to promote your business, you can make your keywords local to help this. ‘SEO expert in Mississauga‘ for example, would be an easier keyword to target than ‘SEO expert’.
Sort out of broken links.
Hey blogger, how many gift guides have you done in the past? Did you write a Christmas gift guide 3 years ago, linking to products that now probably don’t exist anymore? Have bloggers commented on your blog, left their blog link and now their blog is extinct?
Broken links hinder Google’s ability crawling your site. If spiders can’t crawl it, it means they can’t index it. If they can’t index it, they can’t show it in a search.
WordPress users can use a plugin to track broken links. There are also websites that allow you to enter your URL and it returns back to your all your broken links.
Reduce your site speed.
Another thing Google looks at to improve the quality of websites it shows to give a great user experience is site speed. If your blog loads slow, people are going to click off in search for a faster loading site. Not only is it bad for user experience, but it also means it takes longer for Googlebot to crawl your site, meaning it might not index it.
Get your sites speed in Google Page Insights to see how your blog loads and get recommendations.
What are your top tips for driving search traffic to your blog?
Related posts: Increase Your Search Engine Traffic From Google With These SEO Tips For Bloggers
Thanks for the tips, I will defo bare these in mind
Really helpful – I had no idea about the longer content posts. Also you’ve reminded me to check my broken links, so going to be doing that this week 🙂 Tania Michele xx
Really good advice – SEO is so complicated to me, but you broke this down really nicely!
very nice article. keep up the good work