Monday, June 29, 2015

You’ve Got A Blog. Now, Get Readers

You are an aspiring blogger. You write amazing content greatly and have put great time and energy into your posts. With all the talent and hard work, you probably think your work will be instantly widely read and appreciated; it has the quality and content after all! However, having a successful blog is not dependent merely on the content. It takes a lot more effort. This is, in fact, where most rookies in the blogging world make mistakes. You may be a terrific blogger, but unless you invest in promoting and propagating your blog, you’ll never get a decent readership; let alone a huge one.



Good writing and proper content is indispensable to get readers, but there are also other more important factors such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social media promotion, and proper keyword usage, etc. that determine the readership of your blog. So here is a hodgepodge of tips and SEO guidelines to help your blog grow and get readers.

Practice SEO

A blog, site or any sort of web page simply cannot be successful without proper SEO, which is the practice of using different techniques to make your site more visible in the search results page. The goal is to improve your page’s search engine ranking. Since most of the internet surfing process begins with a search engine, you simply cannot neglect this factor.



Numerous SEO tactics are used online, including some unethical and illegal ones; since these might get your site suspended or get you penalized, we’d rather not discuss them. So here are some fully legal and effective SEO guidelines for your blog:

Keywords: Keywords are crucial to get discovered by search engine bots. These are the user’s query that the search engines will look for. Use your keywords wisely and generously, but avoid overusing (or ‘stuffing’) them because this may appear malicious to the bots. Instead, try to revise the excess keywords by replacing them with other similar alternatives. Strategic placement of the keyword such as on the top of a page is also an effective option.

Meta-tags: Meta-tags are keywords that are visible to the search engines but not to the readers. Since it is not always possible to use the target keywords in your page, these ‘meta-tags’ or ‘metadata’ come in as a very useful option. Use your metadata wisely and don’t use irrelevant or excessive tags because you could face negative consequences.

Linking: Linking is one of the most important SEO guidelines because search engines also consider the amount of links to your page as well as the amount of traffic to determine your place on the result page. Therefore, spread the word and exploit social media, partner blogs and other online platforms to link to your page.

Blog more: the more new posts you put up, the more relevant the bots will find you and give you a better ranking on your roster. Plus, it also makes you look more passionate and professional.


Get Socialized




More links equals better rankings but guess what? According to SEO rankings, inbound links from social media sites have even greater weight to determine your position. As a blogger, you probably use other social media platforms as well. Therefore, use these platforms to propagate your site’s link. Publicize them in your Facebook, Instagram and Twitter posts and attach a link to your page. Apart from being a great SEO option, it’ll also bring your work to the attention of people in your social media circles and their respective circles too. This is basically a must-do for any new blogger because this is where most of the primary readership comes from.


Be a guest; invite some too

Writing guest posts on other blogs and having others write some for you is also very helpful in establishing your blog. Now, getting other blogs to let you post or to post for you might be difficult when you’re new in the blogging scene. However, you can use some insights and connections to get this done since it’ll definitely be worth it. Remember to include a link to your own page in the guest post so other readers can discover your blog. Furthermore, this gives you the added benefit of more inbound links as well.


Employ analytics




This may seem somewhat far-fetched to you if you don’t have much IT knowledge. But trust me, it isn’t. There are numerous analytics tools out there to choose from, but for beginners, it is better to use Google analytics. It will give you a lot of insights regarding your blog including number of visits, where and when most traffic is coming from, which posts have more viewership and which sites are sending you more traffic. Study these pieces of information and use the data to find out what category of posts your readers enjoy more, what time is most optimal for posts and what sites you should link more to and post accordingly. Analytics will get you a lot more readers than by merely posting randomly.


Use a keyword analyzer

As being said in the first point, keywords are crucial for SEO; hence, it’s extremely important to use the right ones. Use a keyword analyzer to figure out the most popular keywords related to your content and use these whenever possible. The AdWords Keyword Planner is a useful tool from Google that can help you with this purpose. Just type in the terms you have in mind and it will list out the related and relevant keywords along with their search frequency. Among other options are keywordtool.io and wordstream.com, which are also quite popular and efficient.


Once you use these tactics, we assure you that you will see your blog grow and reach a wider audience. Gather good materials, focus on your articles, design your blogs well and watch as your growing readership appreciates you and your work. With the right combination of talent and tact, nothing can hold you back. It is true!



Eve Haugen has been a freelance writer for a long while. Her passion in writing is her main drive in crafting articles that are engaging, informative, and meaningful. Her partnership with QuickSEOResults has given her a whole new opportunity to take writing to a whole new level.


Wednesday, June 24, 2015

SEO Guidelines: Social Is Important, But It Isn’t Everything

Recently, an increasing number of entrepreneurs have been changing their SEO tactics and focusing more on the social media factors to optimize their site for the search engines. It is true that inbound links from social media sites have a far greater hand at SEO than other sites. However, having a one-track strategy for one’s site, simply won’t give them the desired amount of visitors. In other words, social is important, but it isn’t everything.


Now it’s understandable why most people would choose the simple and seemingly ‘effective’ strategy of using social media to optimize their site. But here’s the truth about social media marketing; this is basically effective just for ‘online advertising’ or to put it simply to bring their links and/or products to the notice of users. These platforms have a far greater active usage than others. To optimize a site for search engines, one will have to do a lot more than using social media to constantly post links to their site.

Here are the other factors that determine how successful a site is with search engines:

  • Keyword optimization
  • Proper content
  • Meta-tags
  • Link building
  • Link quality
  • Frequency of new content

Therefore, numerous factors are at play in working towards a site that will do well in an environment of huge competition. Now, here’s why each of these factors is so important to get readers and some SEO guidelines make the best out of these tips.

Keyword Optimization

According to statistics, about 70% of the internet surfing experience begins with keywords being typed into search engines. This probably gives one an idea of how crucial keywords are to get readers. These are, after all, what will bring most users to the site. 




Optimizing a site for keywords involves a few discreet strategies such as generously using keywords and using these in the most strategic places (such as the page header or at the beginning of an article) but avoiding over usage because the search engines might find this malicious. Using keyword analyzers is also very helpful in finding out the best and the most relevant keywords for one’s page, as well as for the purpose of optimizing the page for the target audience.

Proper Content

Here’s an obvious point that doesn’t need much explanation. No matter how much SEO is invested in a site, it can never be successful to get readers if the content is not up to the mark. Quality content is extremely important. Pages with multimedia, especially videos, were observed to generate three times more priorities than the ones with plain text only. Well-written content with plenty of multimedia as well as an appealing layout attract readers and keep them coming.

Meta-tags

Meta-tags or metadata are the ‘invisible’ tags that are visible to the search engines’ bots but not to the users. Therefore, this tool can be very handy when there’s a relevant keyword that doesn’t exactly fit into the page or is difficult to incorporate into the article text. Again, stuffing the page with meta-tags or using a lot of irrelevant ones are against the SEO guidelines of most search engines. Moreover, engaging in illicit activities might get the page suspended, blocked, or fined. Therefore, it is extremely important to use metadata wisely and carefully.

Link-building

Link building is an extremely important factor in SEO, and we can’t stress this enough. Most of the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing use algorithms or bots called ‘crawlers’ and ‘spiders’. The crawlers frequently scan or ‘crawl’ the millions of web pages regularly and gather information about them. On the other hand, the ‘spiders’ scan cross-linking between the pages of a site. A greater number of links means a better ranking for a particular page in the search results. Moreover, inbound links from a more popular site has greater weight than other sites. This is the reason why so much importance is given to social media for propagating the page. However, it is NOT everything.

Link quality

In the previous point, there is emphasis on the importance of building links for web pages. Nevertheless, that isn’t the only factor that the spiders consider when deciding a page’s position in the search result rankings. The quality of the links is also very important.

The quality of a particular link is influenced by numerous factors such as the strength of the links, the transmission speed and the site giving inbound links. Usually good quality links involve ones from popular and trusted sites such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, etc. Apart from the popularity and the trustworthiness of the site, relevance of the sites to the page’s content is also important. Therefore, it is necessary to choose a proper web hosting service because this determines how fast and strong the links would be, especially within the domain.


A detailed study of SEO rankings has shown that sites having a blog section have far better rankings than sites that haven’t. This is because the search engines’ crawlers also consider the freshness of the site’s content in determining page relevance. There have been many cases of previously top-ranking search results disappearing from their position due to lack of new content. Establishing a blog section for a site or posting new content regularly is a must-do for a successful site.

For busy small-scale entrepreneurs, blogging or putting up new content may be time consuming and not exactly ‘feasible’. In such cases, applying other updates to the page such as new layouts and links can help to make up for the lack of blog posts.

The social component of SEO isn’t everything when it comes to optimizing a site. Upon closely observing a successful site, one will see that they follow all of the SEO guidelines listed above. One should pay attention to their social media strategies as well. But to make it to the top, a holistic approach is always more successful.



 



Eve Haugen has been a freelance writer for a long while. Her passion in writing is her main drive in crafting articles that are engaging, informative, and meaningful. Her partnership with QuickSEOResults has given her a whole new opportunity to take writing to a whole new level.