The era of depending on Facebook traffic is over; it’s now time to think of SEO—In other words, organic traffic. As a blogger, what you need is to learn basic and advanced SEO tricks that could attract reasonable traffic to your blog.
January 2018 started on a bad note for many bloggers. Facebook announced that it would slice the amount of traffic it sends to publishers in favour of content created by family and friends. I remember writing an article on the same, though most bloggers didn’t take it seriously.
Ever since I launched this blog-in 2015-I told myself, “let me focus on long tail keywords and forget about Facebook and Twitter traffic”. I knew by creating content targeting specific audience, my blog will not require social media traffic to be popular. I own a Facebook page, just for the sake, but I rarely share my content on the page. It has less than 7,000 followers and the last time I shared my posts was a month ago. You can click here to confirm. I also own a Twitter account which has 206 followers, I said 206 and not 206,000.The last time I shared my content on Twitter was last year November.
There is one thing I learnt from one of my online friends, that for you to win readers over, you have to come up with unique content, content you will rarely get in other sites.Besides,I noted that you have to ensure each of your articles has its target audience.Lastly,I was taught that for a blog to have a perfect SEO,it must contain well-written titles that more often than not focus on keywords, which we commonly refer to as long tail keywords. Armed with these facts, I started the journey. All along, I have generated content focusing on my readers and ignoring content on other blogs. You will rarely find me lifting articles from other blogs, but I read a lot to bring myself to light in regards to what’s trending. If you go through most of my articles, they have original content and each article targets a specific audience-this is what every established blogger should set their eyes on.
In this ‘post-Facebook’ era, bloggers must learn what works best for them in regards to SEO.SEO entails contain four main sections: the title, first paragraph, main body and conclusion of the story. It also entails the combination of words that form a title. Normally, any reader, except those who stumble on articles on social media, must search for information using specific words. For instance, three quarter of Kenyans are today searching for “Kenya Police Salaries”; if it happens that you wrote an article focusing on the exact keywords readers are using to search the information, you will rank first in search engines, which means more than 90% of the searches will land on your blog.
There is also something most bloggers, to be specific, the most established bloggers don’t understand; the first paragraph in an article plays a significant role when it comes to SEO of a story. In all circumstances, ensure more than 90% of the words used on the title appear on the first paragraph.You notice that when you search any article on Google, you only see the title and first paragraph. The articles with first the paragraph featuring all the keywords on the title is given the best rank.
Over 3 years I have been using a tool called LongTail Keyword Pro.This is one tool that has helped me learn the most important SEO tricks. In some cases, I when realize I have made a mistake on the wording of my titles, I refer to this tool and get the correct and searchable keywords.Initially,I signed up to this tool for free but I started paying after one month. As a blogger, this is one tool you should not miss to use especially if your SEO is poor. Here is the tool
Indexing
You may be shocked that most of your articles are not indexed by Google, Yahoo and Bing, which are the main search engines. Indexing happens when a search engine collects data and stores it on their platforms, such that whoever is searching for the information can easily access it.It is pointless to continue generating content when none of your article is indexed.
To make sure your articles are indexed, make sure you follow the SEO rules I have described above. Again, there are circumstances beyond our reach. For instance, when a blog is new, it takes up to 1 year for Google to notice it’s content. If you find out your new blog is not featuring on search engines, the best thing to do is to use ideal SEO tools to boost its organic rank. One tool bloggers use is SEMrush.This tool ensures all your articles are indexed within no time. The tool is also extremely useful when it comes to keyword suggestions. You can access the SEMrush tool here
Web hosting
Another thing my fellow blogger have failed to learn is that where you host your blog significantly contribute to how search engines rank the site.An ideal web hosting company ensures your blog loading speed is blazing,it has 100% uptime and is free from virus/malware. What we always observe is that cheap webhosting lack few or all the aforementioned things.
You should be aware that frequent downtime are the main causes of poor SEO rank. I confirmed this about two years ago when my blog used to go under almost weekly. I lost a significant number of my audience and my Alexa rank dipped. When I migrated to Kinsta,all my articles started ranking the best among my competitors. You can see I am ranking position 19 in Kenya.By the way,Kinsta is now the best WordPress hosting company in the world.If you manage to migrate your site to the company,I assure you blogging life will never be the same again. Here are Kinsta prices
WordPress Theme, Plugins and images,adverts
Another thing that kills your SEO is the theme you’re using, plugins and images. Many plugins will slow your site, heavy images will slow it too …and poorly optimized theme will dwindle your traffic fortunes.to do justice to your site, reduce the number of plugins, reduce the size of your images and purchase a premium theme. To reduce the size of images, use a snipping tool to clip the images. There is also a wonderful plugin I use which is called WP Smush.Install the plugin and optimize all the images on your site.I will also recommend that you purchase Newspaper theme from WPion,it cost $59.
Lastly, make sure you have few adverts on your site. More than 7 adverts on a page will be detrimental.
Post regularly…also content is key
The final point is that you must post regularly so that readers will have a reason to visit your site.But bear in mind that content is key…if you post content that don’t add value to your readers,no matter how hard you work,your SEO will always be poor.