This is the ninth article in the series Blogging 101 series.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of getting your website through a wide variety of methods on to search engines like Google and Bing. Before people start to search for content on the internet through search engines, all of the content in the world has to be categorizes, labeled, and prioritize. SEO helps you get put higher on that list for specific words and phrases so as to get better traffic to your website.
Let me be up front that this is not an in-depth tutorial on how to do SEO well. We could spend (and may very well do so in the future) as many weeks on that series as we will for this one, but this is simply an introduction into getting you antiquated with what is to come. Here are five ideas to keep in mind when doing SEO for your site. A well done SEO overhaul of your website could be the difference from a significant growth in traffic to your website, so do not hesitate to take the time to learn and grow.
- Make sure your title accurately and simply describes the article
Our titles are what inspire people to click on the links. If we have inaccurate, complicated, or boring titles, we are not doing SEO. Take an extra couple of minutes to tweak your title. It is not uncommon for bloggers to actually change it several times from start to publish. Let the creativity flow, but do not bog it down. I do not have time to read a paragraph title and will pass it by. At the same time, if your title lies to me, I will probably never return to your website. - Know keywords to get more traffic.
Google has a program called Webmaster Tools that help you look at what keywords are most popular with your website, which ones have the greatest click-through ratio (what is the percentage of clicking the links to viewing the page?), and suggestions for other keywords that you have not been using for your website. If you write about parenting and use the words children in your posts all the time, it might be a good idea to compare that to kids and see which one gets more traffic. These little changes can mean the difference to doubling your traffic, so do not ignore it. - Do not forget your images
With social media‘s Pinterest and Google Image Search directing so much traffic to websites via photos, you need to make sure that you are optimizing your images as well. Make sure that the image is engaging, correctly conveys the article visually, is appealing to audiences, and you use simple and accurate words in your ALT tag of the image. - Track search engine traffic in your analytics.
Yesterday, we shared how to use website analytics to measure traffic to your website. One thing that most programs that track this data is who is driving this traffic to you. One section of that list is search engines. What were people searching for when they clicked on your link? What terms seem to be popular? How can we improve these numbers with SEO techniques? - Content is king, SEO follows.
Remember that while a good website can becomes great because of SEO, this optimization only can improve what is already good. We need to remember that the content has to be good in the first place or people will ditch your website shortly after coming to it and will remember the trash you call articles so as to avoid wasting their time. Spend the time on the articles first and if you can, then use SEO tools.
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