4 blogging fundamentals to increase overall website traffic and SEO.

Your blog is a search engine’s best friend.

Blogs are powerful web marketing tools. When used properly, blogs increase traffic to all of your web pages and are a key boost for SEO. Proper usage of blogs means choosing the right blog content, organization, titles, meta tags, categorization and of course keywords. Well developed structured posts with these integrated SEO components written periodically over several years are a search engine’s dream for indexing. Indexing means your customer finds you easier on the web. Well-developed content means your site/business is perceived by the user and search engines as a legitimate authoritative voice within your industry. The more content you have, the more likely readers are to subscribe to you for free valuable information. The subscriber-ship and re-visits to your website are what increase site traffic, and also SEO. Users that re-vist your site indicates to search engines that your website and blog is a valuable source of information worth sharing with others.

Understand that in the broadest terms, blogging increases your whole site SEO and traffic. This post will be detailing how you need to structure, write, organize, and develop your blog to best enhance that outcome of organic SEO and site traffic.

BASIC POINTS ON HOW BLOGGING ORGANICALLY INCREASES YOUR TRAFFIC AND SITE SEO

• You are able to target more search engine keywords and phrases. You simply have more content that search engines are crawling.
• Blogging helps create long term results. Well written blog posts will continue to rank in search engines for years after you’ve written them. These posts are know as Evergreen Content, or content that doesn’t go out of date and will stay relevant for a long time. Think tutorials, instructions, and long form content.
• If your content is valuable other sites will back link to it. This means more opportunities for people to see your site and increase traffic. See why back linking is important.
• Keeps your content fresh. Every new blog post lets search engines know that your website is not outdated information. Search engines punish websites with old content as they’re perceived as less relevant to search engine users.
• Subscribers and engaged readers come back for more content, organically boosting traffic as they browse your posts.
• Every blog post means another indexed page on your website and another opportunity to show up in search engines.

Check out this article at reliablesoft.net digital marketing agency for more details on how blogging helps out SEO allot!

The four concepts you need to implement in your blog posts to drive more traffic and increase SEO.

1. Use the best SEO techniques in your blog content and structure.

Optimizing your blog post SEO is a bit like optimizing SEO for your entire site. Just try to be more specific to your post subject matter content with your SEO keywords, phrases, and transition phrases. Other than typical subject specific SEO, the same typical rules apply as with any other SEO aimed to increase traffic. See some basic SEO techniques below.

In text content optimizations.

First off, choose the right titles and keywords topics that you know your demographic is interested in. Choose titles that are also exactly what searchers would be typing into their search engine to find. Be specific, be niche, target single ideas and topics; these are the best ways to hit for the search keyword you are going for. Structure your posts logically, just as if you were writing a research paper. Provide clear headers, paragraphs, and flow.

Integrating long term keywords.

Long term keywords can also help to maximize your organic search rankings. A long term keyword is a grouping phrase of keywords that a search engine can use to determine user intent. It’s a more advanced SEO topic, but basically search engines tend to value content that matches a user’s specific intentions, not a broad topic. Finding a long term keyword to structure your next blog post around is a great strategy to drive organic search results to your blog.  

Organizational optimizations.

Many content management systems provide the option to add ‘tags’ and ‘categories’. Take advantage of these features as these are often the exact same descriptors the search engines will use to decide whether or not your blog post is relevant to a user’s search. Provide descriptions for your categories in your site meta descriptions too.

Extra tools you can use.

Use built in plugins to analyze the SEO of your content, for example, Yoast for WordPress. These will scan your blog post and give you a somewhat accurate understanding of your post’s relevancy to a keyword or phrase. Use tools like Moz for measuring and understanding other on-page ranking factors such as audience analysis, site rankings, and crawling/auditing. Always allow robots.txt files to crawl you content. These files are use by search engines to index and crawl new and old content as you post or make changes to your website. Blocking robots.txt files in your content will give you an error in the Google search console. Avoid broken links and errors by locating them in the search console, fixing them, and then requesting Google verify you fix!

2. Consistent and frequent posting over a long duration breeds results.

Stay on top of your posting and write consistently rich blog content, optimized for SEO purposes. Companies that publish several times a month get multitudes more leads than companies who publish a few times per year. Google doesn’t want to deliver searchers to out dated websites and information. Consistent blogging gives the search algorithms more reason to index your site regularly. At Morepull Media we utilize an editorial calendar to help track and fill in assignments for the year. A publishing schedule will keep you on track, but don’t push it. If you find your quality slipping in order to achieve your set quantity then scale back your post frequency.

TOP REASONS TO POST ON A CONSISTENT BASIS

• The more frequently and consistently you post the more opportunities you have to strengthen your blog SEO and be indexed higher by search engines.
• Search engine bots will crawl your site on a more consistent basis to match your posting consistency.
• Many of your blog readers will be looking for new posts, don’t keep them waiting. When you stop posting, expect a drop in site traffic to suit. Consistent posting should result in a consistent increase in site traffic.

3. Reach your readers from various avenues.

There are an abundance of ways to share your content with the online world. Make sure you’re taking advantage of all avenues in this regard.

Firstly, set up an RSS feed, which is automated feed of your website content that’s updated when you publish a new blog post. An RSS(Really Simple Syndication) is an XML file extension you can provide readers to use with an RSS feed reader. The XML file automatically syndicates new content through this RSS feed in a standard format that displays in any RSS reader. This way readers can get information from various blogs in one RSS feed reading application.

Providing options for email list distribution via subscription is an integral blog sharing avenue. Email marketing is one the of the highest ROI online marketing techniques today, with some of the highest conversion and click through rates. It’s not outdated or irrelevant. Find the right subscription service for you. Examples: ConvertKit, AWeber, Mailchimp. Create a form for subscription on your blog and set up your email formats.

SEO is big on internal and external links like. In a broad sense, the more links you have pointing to and away from your site, the more trustworthy your site is deemed by search engines. Back-links from another blog or media source are one of the best authority and traffic boosting avenues you can have. Internal links should be set up within your articles to point as references to other articles in your blog.

Lastly, use social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms to enhance exposure of your blog posts. Post on these platforms regularly, just as regularly as your blog posts. Users enjoy multiple options to keep up to date with your information streams. Share excerpts, images, and catchy titles or taglines for the best results.

4. Put thought and care into expressing your original perspectives.

Frequency is important for start up blogs looking to gain users quickly. More important for long term organic growth is quality of posting. Search engines are crawling the web to find the most in depth content rich posts relevant to their user’s search. If your blog post is a re-hash of another blogger’s content, an overplayed theme, or just a trending list or article type then you can bet your article will get lost in the search engine’s rankings, where no one will ever read it. According to a recent article from techjurry, there are over 600 million blogs active in 2020. There’s no controlling the fact that your blog topic is not going to be 100% unique 100% of the time. What you can control is the quality of thoroughness that you cover the topic. Outshine the competition in this regard and your content will rise to the top of the search rankings for the user’s relevant question.

To truly drive traffic to your site using your blog then create rich and insightful quality content with the following in mind.

TIPS FOR RICH CONTENT

• References, resources, and links. Unless you are doing primary research on all of your topic’s chances are, you’d have garnered information from other sources. Share these sources. Give readers the opportunity to delve deeper into specific topics if they desire. Let the sources or blogs you linked know you linked them! If they like your content they might back link to your content in return on their next post.
• Most importantly, unique perspectives are crucial. People are reading your blog because they enjoy your tone, writing style, and the information. Don’t detract from that experience by copying another blog’s style, or re-hashing opinions.
• Research your blog post topic deeply. Take what you’ve learned and express it in a concise manner. Readers will value your content if it servers to break down complex topics into digestible portions.
• Publishing long term content in 2020 is the way to go. Research completed by the prevalent blogging platform, Medium, noted an ideal length of approximately 1600 words. Longer form content keeps readers on you site for longer This gives search engines a signal that your content is relevant to it’s users as they are not clicking away within 10 seconds!
• Grammar, tone, and succinct writing is appreciated. No explanation required.

Overview:

If done right, blogging will increase site wide traffic and SEO.

If you are blogging with the intent to increase overall site traffic then you need to implement 4 basic fundamentals.

First, utilize SEO best practices in your blog post content and organizational structure. Always give your blog posts a change to be discovered organically by search engines.

Second blog consistently and or frequently depending on your goals. Prioritize your quality over your quantity, but never go more than a week or so without posting if you’re just starting out. Remember  that search engines punish outdated content.

Third, use every available outlet to share your content via social media, email, feed services etc. The more options your readers has to share your content the more likely they will be akin to one of those options. Don’t be afraid to ruthlessly self-promote on your own sharing media as well.

Lastly, write real content. Search engines reward blogs with detailed and long form content. Give your readers all the value you can.

To conclude, follow these fundamentals of blogging and watch overall site traffic and SEO trickle into all your pages and services. Blogging in this manner builds real brand authority and establishes trust and engagement with your readers. The goal of your blog is to create a readership that generates leads, customers, and clients. This is essentially inbound marketing, the main marketing strategy we preach here at Morepull Media.

What other strategies do you implement for your blog to drive overall site traffic and SEO?