Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is crucial to you growing your blog because 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine. SEO meaning is basically a process of optimizing a search word for a search engine on your site.
SEO is important because it builds site traffic, increases ROI, builds brand awareness and trust and of course, every site is into it. There are an estimated 4.5 billion active internet users in the world and SEO will aid you in getting traffic to your site.
Your position in a search engine is everything, if you are not in the top 10 then you are not going to be seen. Over 31% of clicks go to the number one position in SERP. According to Google's guidelines, it is better for you to make your pages are optimized to suit the users' needs. SEO for bloggers is vital to building a successful blog. There are various SEO tools you can use to boost the ranking of your blog.
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There are some factors that improve your site's SEO score, let's take a look at some of them. Page speed is an important factor for your site to rank on Google, the slower your site the lesser the conversion rate. Mobile user experience is another important factor, your site needs to be mobile user friendly because about 87% of internet users use their phone to surf the web.
Improve your topical content authority using relevant keywords. You want to keep your URL length short because the longer it is the lower the URL ranking.
The longer your content length the higher the ranking, although the content has to be of high quality to get ranked. SEO backlinks have a huge impact on the rankings of your blog, so you need to get backlinks to sites with high domain authority and have topical relevance to your site.
Brand power and user signals are important factors as well. Your site has to be secured site (SSL certificate) with the encryption - HTTPS (https://). I want to share some basic SEO checklist with you:
1. Set Up Google Search Console And Bing Webmaster Tools
Google Search Console is an essential tool that provides you with invaluable insights into your site's performance as well as a wealth of data that you can use to grow your site's organic visibility and traffic.
Bing is not as popular as Google and is not used as much as google yet getting traffic from bing search is important to you growing your traffic. Google's search engine share on desktop is 87% and a massive 96% share on mobile.
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2. Set Up Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free marketing analytical tool that allows you to view data and insights about how many people are visiting your site, who they are, and how they are engaging with it. There is a new version called Google Analytics 4, which is supposed to be an upgrade on the previous version
3. Generate and Submit a Sitemap
This simply is a list of URLs that specify your site's main content to make sure that it gets crawled and indexed. Confirm that Google can actually index your website.
4. Create a Robots.txt File
Your site's robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers the pages and files that web crawlers can or can't request from your site.
5. Check Search Console For Manual Actions
Manual actions are typically caused by a clear attempt to violate or manipulate Google's Webmaster Guidelines. They are issues on your site that should be fixed for better SEO.
6. Choose the right keywords for your website
Keywords help people find your blog or site, so using the right one is vital to building traffic to your site, not just traffic but traffic that converts (pays). There are resources you can use for keyword research like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Ubbersuggest, Google trends, Quora, Amazon reviews, social shares, Google Search, and KWfinder.
Wikipedia can also give you some great keyword ideas from their rich content, you can also get keywords ideas from competitors' sites. While carrying out your keyword research you need to understand your keyword goals, sales, build your site traffic, want to get ad clicks or ad impressions for paid traffic, or build awareness of your site.
Steps to keyword success include building your keyword list, research your target three musketeers (your desires, customer's desires, and influencer's desires), understand the keyword metrics, match the customer journey, and refine your keyword list. You will have to match the customer's buying journey by using buying keywords that buying customers use in order to covert your site's visitors.
It is important to use keywords that are less competitive this will aid you in ranking easily on the first page of Google Search. You can use the tools listed above to search for keywords with lower SEO difficulty and write content on them.
7. On-Page SEO
Let's look at some on page SEO basics
There are some factors that help your content to rank higher such as Title, Headlines, first 100 words of your content, internal and external links on your page, URL structure, readability, and clarity of your content. Of course, the use of images, videos, and social sharing also helps improve your page's SEO.
Summary
It is important you carry out the above actions to boost your blog's ranking in search engines, this will help in building traffic to your site. SEO is one of the challenges you have to overcome as a newbie. Whether your business is small or big, you can still rank for some specific keywords with fewer difficulties.
It is a continual practice to keep growing your page's ranking and hence traffic. I wish you all the best in your journey to page one of SERP.
That's all folks.
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