SEO Made Simple For Bloggers

If you are interested in blogging, then it might come from a place of wanting to write. You might want to start a blog as a way to document something specific going on in your life, such as pregnancy, a year out travelling, or an illness. You may want to go into blogging for the money or the ‘freebies,’ after you have seen others doing the same. Whatever your motivation is for blogging, getting to grips with SEO (or search engine optimization) is going to make your life as a blogger much easier. But what is SEO in practical terms for bloggers, and how can it help? 

Search Engine Optimization

As mentioned above, SEO stands for search engine optimization. Put simply, it is a way to make sure that your content is created in such a way that it will help it to stand out when someone searches for something relevant to it on Google. When you take steps to optimize your content, then you will see your blog above higher and higher, especially as time passes and search engines can see that your posts are relevant to what people are searching for, and you have backlinks back to your site, showing how valuable it is. An SEO agency would be able to show you more if you want to take things to the next level. But there are some things that you can easily do yourself to boost your SEO, without having to pay someone.

If you are keen to get found more online to boost your traffic, which can be especially useful if you’re looking to make money from your blog or want to share your story on something specific, then you need to think about the content that you are creating. If you want to get found in search results for something specific, then you need to be answering a question that someone would be searching for. When you are creating content that someone would be looking for, then you have done your job as a blogger

What search engines look for

There are a number of things that search engines will look for, in order to determine if your content is good enough to rank in a certain position. These are:

• Your site’s organic click-through-rate
• The site’s domain authority, which is a number given depending on how old the site is, and how many backlinks it has, to name a few
• The domain relevancy of your website. If you have a travel blog but then start sharing recipes, you’ll find it hard to rank for the recipes
• How user and mobile-friendly the site is
• Bounce rate or dwell rate. If the rate is high, it shows that people find your site, click through and it doesn’t answer what they were searching for, so will quickly click away
• The number of backlinks to your site
• Quality content

If you want to get more traffic, whether it is to earn more or to simply get content shared, then these things should be taken into account. It can feel like a lot, but working a little on it each time you post can make a difference.

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