Search engine optimization (SEO) is a very important part of building a successful niche blog. You can use SEO to drive free traffic to your blog so that you don’t need to rely on paid ads. You probably already do some SEO without even realising it. Especially if you are using self-hosted WordPress as your blogging platform. You can learn everything you need to know about SEO and optimizing your blog or website via Google’s Webmaster Tools. But here is a brief overview for you to help you get started.
The two main types of SEO
There are two main types of SEO. On-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO is any SEO that you use within your website or blog. Off-page SEO refers to any SEO that you use outside of your website or blog, such as social media, guest blogging, article marketing and link building. Most of your SEO is going to occur right on your blog in the form of keywords used in your web pages and blog posts.
What are keywords?
These are search terms that your audience is most likely to use to locate your information. Most of the time, people type in two to three words to find information about the topic they are searching for. These are called ‘long-tail’ keywords. These are the type of keywords you should focus on when you use SEO to drive free traffic to your blog.
Where should keywords go?
On your blog site, keywords should be in the titles of each page and blog post as well as used within the text of the copy on your blog. They should also be included in any links on your site, in the title bar, as header text, subheadings and anchor text. You also want to use keywords in the meta tag description area so that when someone searches, a nice description appears.
How many keywords should you use?
Try not to use more than two or three different keywords per page of your website and don’t use the same keywords for every single page. When you do keyword research, try to come up with at least 100 keywords and keyword phrases on which you can focus for your entire site. Within the copy of your blog, try not to use the keywords more than 2% of the time. Anything more will be considered keyword stuffing by Google Search.
Which type of SEO is best?
Some people believe that off-page SEO is more important than on-page SEO. This is an argument for another time. For now, as a beginner, you want to focus on the content you have right on your own website or blog. After you’ve perfected that, then you can start focusing on off-page SEO in terms of using social media marketing, article marketing and link building.
Link building
Link building is very important in terms of your search results. If you have plenty of high-quality links going to your site from other people sharing your information on social media, your ranking will go up. Pay close attention to who links to you as well as who you link out to. Google tries to match these links to ensure that your site is about what you say it’s about. You want others linking into your site to agree with your description so that Google returns search results that include your website or blog.
Next time, I’ll explain why content is king and always will be! In the meantime, have a go at including some keywords in your blog posts. The more you do this, the easier you’ll find it to fit them within your content naturally. Then you can enjoy more visitors to your blog site as you benefit from increased free traffic from search engines.
Image credits
Main image: Merakist on Unsplash Second image: Pixabay (via Pexels) Third image: Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash
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