[This is a guest submission…]
Perhaps the biggest compliment a blogger can receive is more traffic (an increase in the number of visitors) to their site. It creates a feeling of accomplishment and high credibility. Any blogger would enjoy the reputation of having their opinions and information spread across the Internet, reaching thousands, if not millions of people.
This question (more like a desire) consumes the minds of most bloggers and it’s quite legit. In fact, every time I talk to someone who blogs, the first thing they ask me is “How can I improve my SEO” once they find out I’m an SEO guy.
The answer to this question depends on what subject you blog about, but no matter what your subject is, with better SEO, a blogger can have a greater impact on larger communities (get more traffic to their site.)
So how does a blogger improve their seo ranking?
In this post, I’ve done everything I can to come up with the three most effective ways a blogger can improve their SEO. These three ways are from personal experience and the consistent study of successful bloggers.
Before I go into the three ways, I want to share a little personal philosophy about SEO. I’ve had many discussions (near arguments) with SEO experts that claim SEO is all about mathematics and quantification.
I highly disagree. I think there is more of an art to SEO than a science- and the reason why is because we are humans. Humans read (or watch/hear) the blog posts themselves and if it moves them in ways that are inspirational, informative, and extremely helpful, people will share the posts with others. This is the best way to establish backlinks to your website (and btw, back links are the most effective way to improve your SEO.)
Okay, now that I’ve got that off my chest, let’s get down to the three ways you, as a blogger, can improve your SEO ranking:
- Transform your titles. Do you know what transformation means? In an artful way, it means to magically change the appearance of something.
To magically change the appearance of your titles, you can move words around, restructure your titles to be in the form of a question, or create a shock value (state something that makes a reader say “What!”)
When you do this, it is imperative to include the keyword phrase you want to optimize for. Do you know what your keyword phrase is each time you create a blog post? It helps to know. It will improve your seo.
For example, I did my research for a keyword phrase to optimize for with this blog post (actually, I’m hoping to get rankings for two keyword phrases.) I found that the term “improve seo ranking” averages 1300 searches per month and the amount of websites competing for the keyword phrase is average. By looking at the numbers, I have assessed that my chances of ranking for this term are pretty good- so the keyword phrase has been included in the title of this post.
Titles need to be catchy… a boring title doesn’t get visits. But to be catchy with the search engines, your title should include your keyword phrase. Spending extra time to do “healthy” keyword research will
provide impressive results for the optimization of your blog. - Answer the questions that are being asked. Let’s think for a moment
what the purpose of a blog is…Yes, it’s a web log, and it is the more common way to share information about a certain subject.
When you consider the purpose of a blog, it’s good to know that the more helpful you are to the readers/viewers of it, the more value it’s going to create.
What’s a better way to be more helpful than by answering questions?
Don’t try to answer that question 😉 stay with me. A blogger may think they know what questions are being asked for a certain subject, but there are ways to find out if they really are.
You can use LinkedIn’s “Answers” social media tool to research the questions being asked about your subject. You can also use “Yahoo! Answers.” How about forums- try a Google search for “[your subject] forums.” You’ll find plenty of discussion topics where people are
looking for an answer to something specific. And if you can provide a helpful answer, share it in your blog post.If you’re questioning how that can improve SEO rankings, consider this: Google has shared that their search queries are getting more and more specific. Bloggers can assume (with confidence) that these specific search terms are often in the form of questions. People want to know answers to many things- and they are typing these questions into the search engines.
Answer the right questions and you’ll notice your SEO rankings improve.
I promise.
- Contribute to the conversation(s). Another thing that makes a blogger feel good is when they receive comments on their posts (preferably nice comments.) This is why most bloggers leave their comment sections open for readers to share what they got out of the post.
When you create a list of blog subjects that are complimentary to yours, you can use Google alerts to inform you of when content is published
about these subjects. You can also subscribe to the blogs that compliment yours in Google reader. It will organize and structure all the blogs you subscribe to.When you have a large list of complimentary blogs, contribute to the conversations going on within them. Make smart comments that are helpful, supportive, and inquisitive. More viewers of the blog post will notice your contribution and click your link.
And if you don’t believe me, I honestly have this happen to me often. Two weeks ago, I asked a very important question to a blogger that could have included the content in the post. I noticed in my analytics that week that I had hundreds of clicks to my website from that blog post comment. I was a little surprised because I didn’t realize how important my question was to the rest of the community, but it was- the clicks were the proof.
Commenting on other bloggers’ posts can provide a link to your site, and there are debatable discussions of whether this helps your SEO or not. I’m gonna bypass that debate and stick to my point of: contributing to the conversations that compliment your blog subject will create opportunities for your website to be visited by more people who are interested in your subject matter.
This is a creative, social, and artful way to improve SEO rankings for your blog.
Well, you’ve now got some goodies to imrove SEO rankings for your blog. Hopefully you see the results within a few months. If you don’t, I suggest you revisit your keywords and check to see if there are more specific phrases that are less competitive with other websites. Always keep in mind- the right keywords produce the best results!
Happy SEO blogging!
with a passion to teach creative SEO. He shows people how to do Internet
marketing promotion in 5 minutes a day. You can learn more about how
Reid does this by visiting his website, growthinharmony.com
Comment box is not shown in my website…what will do…plz help sir….
Thanks for sharing such a great article…
I trained as a reporter and I’d say unusual or wacky headlines or titles instantly attract the readers attention. I’d recommend that bloggers skim over the UK national tabloid The Sun. A down market paper but they are masters of attention grabbing headlines and punning.
Good recommendation on The Sun, Alina, but I can’t quite get past page 3 when I read that paper… 🙂
So while using a specific keyword where should I focus it more? On the topic of a post or in the inside content?
Most bloggers don’t start out with knowledge of SEO. They then get overwhelmed when they are first presented with the concept, and some decide to ignore it completely. But learning the basics about SEO – what it is, why and how to utilize it – will help grow your blog and the number of people it reaches. Don’t worry… it’s really not that hard.
I hopeyour blog apeady is onhe top of SEO
Quite agree 100% with your reviews, especially as it concerns optimizing keywords, that to me is the ‘salt of the matter’, as it can make or mar a successful blog.
Make a successful blog in the sense that a resourceful implementation of rich and popular keywords will elevate your blog in search engines listing in weeks.
While, at the same time over SPAMMING keywords kill a rather successful blog.
Hi,
Great seo info
i just started my blog ” http://ndsgamez.blogspot.com/ ” and was wondering how to get more traffic and i think ive got what i need
thanks for ur post
Thanks for the sharing such information.This is great stuff and great reading. I will pass it on to our audience.
Honestly, I rarely see pop-unders any more and generally associate them more with viruses and sites that are so aggressive about advertising that they’re annoying. Your experience may vary, but I think you’d do better to focus on producing more good content on your site than on squeezing every penny out of the few visitors you get.
What do you think of pop-under exchanges? I’m having trouble getting visitors to my site, so I’m thinking about trying one. Are they effective??
There are tons of potential techniques to improve ranking of your blog.
The problem I see though is with blogging itself. Companies face tremendous pressure to become producers of content on the internet. They must do this to be “discoverable”, but many of them don’t really want this additional responsibility (plus needing to learn concepts presented in Dave’s blog).
There are other problems blogging creates:
http://www.customsoftwarebypreston.com/seo-rankings-blogging
I’m always looking around for new and different approaches to building rank and increasing traffic and I can say first hand creating ‘shock’ value titles is one idea that I don’t see mentioned enough. I mean think about it would you read ‘Apple kills Jobs!’ or would you read ‘An Apple A Day Puts Doctors Out Of Business’. Obviously the first is going to get a ton more traffic if indexed and promoted properly.
I realize that humans are not all about numbers, when it comes to picking websites, but aren’t googlebots computers? I’m not sure how the “art” comes into play when page rank is decided not by humans (exactly) but by computes…
I trained as a reporter and I’d say unusual or wacky headlines or titles instantly attract the readers attention. I’d recommend that bloggers skim over the UK national tabloid The Sun. A down market paper but they are masters of attention grabbing headlines and punning.
This is great information. I will be asking more questions in the titles of my blog posts.
By the way, I did a Google search for your keyword phrase and you are in the number nine position, first page!
That’s pretty amazing that you even discovered the term to target in light of all the people competing in the SEO market. How long did it take you to narrow that one down?
I find the phrase
“Bloggers can assume (with confidence) that these specific search terms are often in the form of questions.” to be a pretty bold statement. Any thoughts on that anyone? Or even better, are there numbers to be found on that subject ?