Blogging and SEO: How to Write A Blog Post That Ranks Fast

Blogging and SEO: How to Write A Blog Post That Ranks Fast and Increases you Website Visibility in 10 Easy Steps! – Podcast!

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We have been asked how we keep presenting posts that seem to attract a targeted audience.

We have learnt from Ray Higdon and Peter Montoya that your blog/website is your most powerful web marketing tool and can be the source of residual income. But only if you get eyeballs from your ideal audience or customer! In this article inspired by Amy Porterfield’s original article which you can read here. 

We share some simple tweaks you can make to your blog that should help increase your SEO and visibility. Leading to more organic traffic, more leads and sales…Cool?

Let’s get it…

1.   DO YOU OWN YOUR DOMAIN?

Okay this could be controversial esp. as we have our Luxury Travel Blog a brand new niche website hosted on MLSP Sites.

But here is the deal, though we are huge fans of, Blogger, Wix, WordPress. Yet we don’t encourage you to run a business blog with a wix.com, WordPress.com  or blogger.com domain, period.

Here is the reality, when we blog on someone else’s domain, as above we’re building  their  search engine visibility, not ours…that’s the honest truth!

Here is the scary bit and why we urge you to back up each and every bit of your blog posts on such hosted domains either on Evernote, ifttt or as word documents…Many blogging platforms have folded along with people’s awesome content in the past few years. Anyone remember WUN? Even if you are able to save your articles an content, you’ll never recover all your inbound links and the trust you built up at that domain… So please do listen up…and learn!

It’s critical to your success that you OWN YOUR domain name PERIOD. Don’t say we never warned you!

2. Blogging and SEO: Link Your e-store to Your blog For SEO & Visibility:

How often have you found that you post a sales page on social media and it gets no traction and you post a vlog or tutorial on same topic with your sales page and you get great engagement? See blogs are meant to be more like a conversation, so by nature shouldn’t be pitchy. The training and tips approach does encourage other bloggers to link to you. Trust when we say they would be less likely to link to an e-commerce site.

Our goal has always not been to have the most popular blog, rather to build our business. Similarly if you wish to leverage your blog to grow your business, you’ll want to create keyword-rich links from blog posts to sales pages on your website.

We encourage you to grab our highly converting Free PDF DOWNLOAD “Product Keyword Research Guide” below.

A blog post about tips for travel planning might link to your page that sells flights and package holidays. A post about finding the right nutritional supplements for a baby boomer might link to your page on Healthy foods and recipes for families.

Remember search engines focus on the link words, so avoid using links with such verbiage as “Learn more here” or “click here.” You will find that this reduces your site SEO when you use tools like similarweb to check. You’ll want to create links that use the phrase for the article title e.g. “nutritional supplements for baby-boomers.” 

How about  encouraging guest blogging. Create multiple blog posts esp. guest blogs that point to a given page on your site. This will help increase search engine visibility of any of your webpages.

3. Use The Right Plugin for your On page SEO

There have been changes to the Yoast Plug in Learn what they are in our Facebook Video Below:

We assume you already have SEO plugins for your blog downloaded and activated. If you use WordPress you are spoilt for choice. We use Yoast for SEO they have an awesome plugin for SEO purposes. We also use Squirrly on another blog we publish. This plugin is on page optimization on speed. It gives you related keywords, images, blog posts, tweets etc. It also advises you how best to improve your blog and content for SEO. It has a paid and free version. Its a massive competition for Yoast!

The Yoast SEO Plugin is the one we will focus on today.

This SEO plugin helps you write SEO-friendly blog posts. You start by typing your focus keyword in the appropriate box. After you have checked that it will rank better for your post and bring the “Low hanging fruit.” Yoast plugin uses several criteria (see image below of what it does check). This helps with making your blog post SEO-friendly and as the image below shows lets you know where you may be falling short!

Yoast plugin checks whether or not you used your keyword in 5 important locations:

• the article-heading,
• the title of the page,
• the URL of the page,
• the content of the article AND
• the meta-description.

It also ensures that your readers will have a good experience. And this is the one that we used to struggle with. The flesh reading score…But we since learnt to write shorter sentences and things got lots better!

It calculates the number of words vis-à-vis the density of your focus keyword in the post. And also lets you know if that keyword has been used on other posts or pages on your website use the same focus keyword. You want each and every post to rank as opposed to competing with yourself, right!

You get the GREEN LIGHT aka green spot if your post meets the above criteria, and every green spot improves your posts ranking on search engines. BUT not every spot need be green. We have posts that still ranked high despite having a couple of orange and even Red Spots in the Yoast criteria e.g. the one above!

4. Content Calendar: Use Keywords

We did talk about creating a content calendar before. Once you do that you will have topics on tap. Hopefully you will have researched and found that they are keyword-rich topics.

Did you know that every blog post you write essentially is a mini web page? See every web page is fresh opportunity to rank well for a specific keyword or search by your target audience, for a long time to come! If you create content that’s evergreen your website will attract visitors, subscribers and sales all year long! If its SEO is done properly.

It’s essential that you keep checking social media, and search engines for trending topics and questions from your target market! Once you spot a topic that suites your niche and is part of your content calendar topics, do a keyword search we use the Mozilla SEO tool, which is free with mega resources. 

Find out how competitive that keyword is. The higher the competition, the tougher it is to get onto page 1 of the search engines. Once you have your keyword, create your content calendar topics around the word or subject! And create your fresh content aka blog posts round that keyword/phrase. Each page on your website that meets the right criteria will increase your search engine ranking. Think of each page as a new opportunity to try for the top rank aka page 1 of Google!

5. Blogging and SEO – Use your keyword or phrase into your copy often.

Your title is the start, now we want to see that keyword in your post content and copy. It should definitely be included in your first sentence in the 1^st paragraph. Repeat it naturally in the rest of your post. If you have noticed, Julie and I simply open our posts with an overview of our topic 1-2 sentences tops and highlight it too.

Caution: Don’t keyword stuff your blog post, that as we all know could cause you trouble and backfire on your SEO agenda. Google and other search engines may punish you for “over-optimizing” your post.

6. Blogging and SEO- Is your Title Keyword Rich?

Remember that your blog post title will by default, become the title of your “web page.” Google and other search engines give more credence to your page title as the top criteria. Usually WordPress will use your title by default as your permalink. It’s thus good practice to ensure its included. Check your permalink to ensure it also reads right & contains your keyword/s.

Don’t use vague or non-commercial titles for your posts if you wish to attract a targeted commercial audience. We have handled this particular topic in our post on keyword research for niche markets blog post. We often see awesome blogs with a lackluster title if you struggle with this we got you covered

We recommend that you check out our post on How to create Killer blog Titles too. See your ideal customers aren’t searching for your post if the title doesn’t stand out for all the right reasons.

7. Blogging and SEO: Maximizing Visibility and Ranking for your Blog Post:

• We have learnt to mostly use numbers in our blog titles e.g. 9 Super hacks to speed up your website. Note we use an odd number…Again it works best that way!

• Lead with the keyword in title! This helps the bots find it faster and thus weigh better for your post. E.g. Keyword research: how to do it right for your blog. The 2 lead words are the Keyword…no pun intended.

You could break up your keywords. If you wanted to rank well for, say, “Juleskalpauli Web Design,” you could use that phrase exactly once or twice, but also use just “juleskalpauli” and “Web Design” separately in other instances.

8. Blogging and SEO: Social Sharing Myths busted:

Google and other search engines do use Social Shares as one of your website ranking criteria. Sadly just recently Twitter decided to pull the plug on its social share counts links and effectively decimated most websites social proof, and possibly ranking too! When someone shares your post on social media or networks and also comments, such links from social media & comments carry the “no follow” link. Meaning no search engine benefits are being transferred. BUT they do bring Social Proof and good to read” kind of advantage to your web page. Google is specially ambiguous and grey on how much impact social shares have on a blog search results.

But here is the good news undoubtedly Facebook powers Bing’s customized search.

Obviously the more Google+ shares and likes you have the better your Google search results.

More social shares on your web pages equates to a measure of “popularity” also known as SOCIAL PROOF.

Now other types of links are:

• Inbound links
• Outbound links

Inbound links- are links from other websites and blogs. These unlike social shares do increase your search engine visibility, we like them!

By you sharing and having your audience share your post on social media platforms; by law of averages you’ll drive more traffic to your blog. This is turn gets it ranking even more and further build awareness of your website.

Here is our insight on this blogging and SEO: if we keep sharing who knows what a tweet, facebook share or a G+ could do even if it may not necessarily boost our overall ranking!

An influencer may like what they see. They may connect to or link to us. This is link juice as you know, which does carry search engine weight. That’s why we have social share buttons on all our posts and pages. It’s also why we have every image socially shareable and all text on our posts is again Shareable. Simply highlight a paragraph or sentence and you will like magic have a box of text with handle and link ready for you to tweet or Facebook share like below:

It’s always important to remember that having lots of links to your site doesn’t equate to site authority. It purely depends on the linking website authority, to pass on link juice to yours. Authority is derived from sites that are deemed trust worthy or authoritative, and must have some kind of relation to the blog topic.

 9. Blogging and SEO – Fresh Content better Visibility:

First things first; fresh content has to be better than any previous content on the topic to rank better.

This one has become a lil controversial of late: Does fresh content help your website rank higher and faster? The answer is Not Necessarily!  You see search engines prefer to serve users searching with a keyword query, with an optimal user experience.  They thus seek fresh, up-to-date content from websites and pages. They call this: Query Deserves Freshness or QDF. And as you know the best optimized pages get the holy grail of organic search traffic.

A deeper diver shows that QDF is a system of identifying search terms that are trending, with the most up to date or recent information. So if you get it right you qualify for QDF based traffic, and this among other things is what you need:

1. Fresh Content on your website, and
2. Having the right terms on your webpage.

This sounds simple, so why don’t more blogs rank? Because as we all know Google algorithms are complicated and secret. So much more is at stake here. Simply having “fresh content” thus doesn’t mean you automatically qualify for QDF. If your content has target terms that aren’t QDF associated, then you won’t get any QDF benefit, regardless of how fresh your content is!

You really ought to be back-linking your new content to your old content to make the most of the relevancy/link value. And also to refresh your old content, so it’s not archived by search engines forever! Interlinking your posts is great for site structure and internal links in general. Having several posts in a category aka topical-groups can help consolidate your site and give a better impression to the Search Engines. It also helps SE bots to see what terms are present and likely associated.

10. Wrapping up – Blogging and SEO:

To have a website that is visible on SE and attracts organic traffic is what every webmaster dreams of. Don’t forget to ensure your site is Mobile friendly and is optimized for responsiveness. Some themes have this inbuilt. For the rest there are plugins to the rescue. We use the WP touch plugin!  

So quick recap:

• Own & Control Your blog domain.
• Link your e-commerce or e-store to your blog.
• Use the right SEO plugins.
• Create a Content Calendar using Keyword research!
• Keyword Rich blog post. Populate your keyword/phrase in your headlines and content body, without over optimizing!
• Title should have your Keyword/s.
• Ensure your blog and website is socially shareable.
• Always add Optimized Fresh content.
• It’s essential to optimize your images of course and Try to include a Pinterest Optimized image if you leverage Pinterest for business!
• Watch out for those duplicate topic tags. HubSpot actually handled this point in their post on SEO friendly blog posts read it!
• Also ensure your categories are not duplicate as that could cause you a google ding! For instance we had Facebook Algorithm as a category and Facebook marketing We have since deleted the algorithm category!

SUPER-TIP: Prepare for the next Google Penguin Checks 2016 and ensure you continue penalty free. Read all about it by Searchengineland article here!

It’s always advisable to check your blog SEO and we did share some 37 incredibly useful tools to help you out. You could also use Google’s SEO section in Webmaster Tools, we recommend bookmark it for regular checks.

More Blogging and SEO Training for you:

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Well if you enjoyed our Blogging and SEO post and you have some more SE tips, how about first you like & share this post. Then share your tips below, we’d love to hear from you!

If your blog is not pulling in  a min 5-10 leads per day, you need this immediately, Free Instant Access SEO Webinar. 

As always you deserve more;

Live. Learn. Love

Pauli Kalungi

Skype: Julie.Kalungi1

Email: julieatJuleskalpauli[dot]com

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PS: IF YOUR PLANNING TO TRAVEL THIS SEASON YOU MIGHT LIKE TO CHECKOUT THE SAVINGS ON PREMIUM ACCOMMODATION AND GIFT SHOPPING YOU COULD MAKE HERE (UNLESS YOU LOVE PAYING RETAIL INSTEAD WHOLESALE) – CLICK HERE FOR INSTANT ACCESS