This post is about complete SEO blogging for beginners walk through, a guide and it revolves around
- How to get started with keyword research
- How to create epic content around each of the keywords
- How to optimize your content with keywords
- How to optimize your content for users and search engines
- How to build backlinks
- And a BONUS step
Lets dive into it and talk about it thoroughly.
How to get Started with Keyword Research?
To start blogging successfully I recommend you to start with finding 3 keywords and post the content around it.
Here are the few steps to find the keywords for your first blog.
Head over to Answer the Public. Answer the public provide you the instant, raw search insights directly from the mind of your customers. This free tools finds questions from forums, blogs and on social media. Answer the public turns these questions into awesome keywords. Benefit of this is that usually these keywords are long tail keywords, they are long and very specific. So as you know most of people doesn't use long tail keywords so that's mean these keywords are low competitive mean ranking on Google using these keywords is simple and easy for new bloggers.
Exploding Topics is another free tool that bubble up trending topics in industries like tech, health, marketing and more. Because these topics are relatively new, the keyword user finds on them are usually less competitive.
How to create epic content around each of the keywords?
According to study, 94% of blog post have zero external links, mean viewer won't share these post. Meaning these blog posts are not that great/epic and if its not great its going to get lost among the millions of blog posts, tweets, YouTube videos and twitch streams that come out every single day.
So if you want to your content to be stand out it can't just be a good or even great. So for you content something to be someone else link to it needs to be EPIC. Now there is no formula to create epic content.
But there are few things you can do to increase the odds that people will share and most importantly linked to your content.
Try to write long and in-depth articles. As studies proved the long content gets an average of 77% more backlinks than a short articles.
Basically anything that makes anyone wow, "I needs to linked to this" can work.
How to optimize your content with Keywords
On-page SEO has been changed a lot over the last few years. Previously SEO is about stuffing you articles with keywords. But that doesn't work anymore.Instead, the goal of on-page SEO today is to give Google context about what your page is all about. Yes you still need to use keywords in your content but you also need to help Google to understand your pages overall topic.
Here's how to do it:
Your first step is to include your target keywords in a few important places on your page. That way Google can understand that your page is about that specific terms. Specifically you wanna add your keywords to these areas of your page.
- In your title tag
- In the first 100 words of your page
- In your image alt text
- In a H1 tag
- In a H2/H3 tag
- In the last 100 words of your page
Next its time to give Google more context about your page. The best way to do that LSI Keywords. LSI keywords are words in phrases and closely related to your targeted keywords.
How to optimize your content for users and search engines
Previously Google rank website in terms of their backlinks. The website with most backlinks stand number 1 on the search list. Yes backlinks are still important but backlinks aren't enough your content also needs to be optimized for users. That because Google pays very close attention to how people interact with your site in the search results.
If they notice users click on your site and quickly heading back to Google, They'll down rank you.
But they see users sticking on your webpage, that's a sign that you providing user what they actually want to see then you usually get ranking boost.
So you have to optimize your content for user so they stay on your page. First structure a content, so people start getting actionable info ASAP.
So you don't have to start your post with long explanation about why the topic is important, that only make people bounce. Instead, use the short info about the topics you covering in this article.
Next thing is your design should be simple and easy to understand for users.
How to Build BackLinks:
To start creating backlinks, the best way is the find broken links. Use Check my link Google Chrome extension to find broken link of the webpage.
Once you find the broken link you need to write/find the article that has a resemblance to the broken link. Now reach out to the administrator of that site using email.
I don't recommend sending out same generic email to hundred different people. In a survey I found out personalized email gets 30% better response than those that send non-personalized emails.
Bonus: Use unique Images
Can using Stock images on your site hurt your Google raning? The Answer is YES they might.
Whenever you use unique images in your content, these can be picture that you take from your phone or illustrations you make on photoshop or screenshot you take yourself. As study reveals these images can create direct impact on search engine rankings.
Did you learn something new from this blog post? if so, make sure to share it with others.
Also do let me know which technique are you going to implement first.