Simple SEO Tips
Ok, so you have setup your blog, networked with other bloggers, become active across multiple social media platforms, and written a plethora of high quality articles. But you’re still not ranking well in search engines and the web traffic gods just aren’t smiling on your blog they way you thought they would.
Well you are in luck! In this article, I would like to share with you 4 simple SEO tips for getting your search rankings elevated, bringing more traffic juice to your already awesome blog.
Create High Quality Content
I know what you’re thinking – I already have great content! I know, I know – but it can’t be overstated. The first and foremost way to get better search ranking results and drive more traffic to your magnificent blog is to put forth your best effort when writing your posts and articles. No matter how much you post, if it’s not worth reading, you’re just spinning your wheels. Posting really great content that gives value to your readers will get noticed and shared, increasing social proof. With each successive link and share, search engines will likely increase their opinions of your content. This in turn, will result in the search engines ranking your content higher, thus generating more and more traffic. Plus, creating high quality content will bring referral traffic as well, along with search engine traffic.
Create Internal Links
Another important way to optimize your site for search engines is to create internal links on each post. By creating links to other relevant posts on your site, you are essentially helping the search engines stay on your site longer and keep crawling through your various related posts. Creating internal links also helps reduce bounce rate by keeping your readers engaged longer and providing them with links to other compelling content that might be of interest to them. Internal linking keeps your readers happy by giving them more great content and also keeps the search engines happy by giving them more content to index – it’s a win-win situation!
Use an SEO Plugin
Anybody who knows me even a little bit knows I think WordPress is the best CMS (Content Management System) available today. And within the WordPress community there are numerous SEO plugins available — both for free and for purchase. Now, if you know me at all, you also know that I use the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast on my main blog. It works wonderfully on my site and my traffic jumped up as soon as I installed it. Plus, it have some really great features, like the ability for you to set the SEO title, meta description, and URL for each post. You can also perform an SEO check before you hit the publish button for additional suggestions and reminders. It really is a robust SEO plugin and the best part is it’s FREE!
Mind Your Permalinks and Slugs
The default URL structure for most blogging platforms, including WordPress, is to use what is commonly referred to as a query string, which looks something like this:
http://inspiretothrive.com/?p=10323
Not very attractive, huh? Plus, it’s not easy to read – for human readers or for search engine crawlers. So, if the search engines can’t read your links, they can’t rank your content. If you haven’t already done so, you need to change your permalinks to something that is easy for both your readers and the search engines to read. The URL of your post should contain the keywords you want the search engines to rank your post for. This part of the link is called the “slug.” If you need help with this, you can read my post on setting up your permalinks and slugs. Either way, the resulting URL should look more like this:
http://inspiretothrive.com/4-simple-seo-tips-for-bloggers/
This new URL, or link, is now readable for both your audience and the search engines, which will now be indexed and shared, resulting in higher rankings and more traffic.
I hope this helps you get your content ranked better in the search engines. I would love to hear from you in the comments below. Let me know what you do to get your posts ranked higher in search engine results. Share your ideas and give this post a share as well!
