SEO Blogs: Improve Website Ranking In 2024
Even though the concept of blogging was introduced in the late 1990s, it didn’t reach its widespread popularity of today until the late 2000s. What started as another medium of socializing or as a platform to showcase your literary talents has become one of the highest-paying niches today. Read on to know more about SEO and how you can make use of SEO to improve your blog traffic and rating.
But not all those who have a blog are earning money; some of the blogs out there are not even being read by many people. What may come as a surprise is the fact that these blog posts are actually very well written and has some great content. We might also have seen viral internet posts that might not have been so great either.
Why is this happening? The answer to this question is SEO or Search Engine Optimization. What use is a good article if it is not going to show up in any browser searches? This is where SEO comes into the picture.
Learn to create online campaigns with The Best Online Digital Marketing Course
What is SEO?
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a set of processes through which we can improve the traffic to our sites. Simply put, it makes our content reach a wider audience by increasing the chances of it showing up when a user searches for a related keyword from any of the browsers.
And no, we are not talking about paying robot sites to increase the fake views and comments on our posts either. By following certain practices and standards while writing content, we can drive real unpaid traffic to our sites.
Why are SEO blogs Needed?
Chances are, you are reading this article because you searched for a keyword related to SEO. This is easily why SEO is needed. To drive traffic and make sure our content is not dead. As mentioned earlier, having great content is only half of the work. The actual test is having people read it and contribute to the healthy traffic.
The growth of any blog or website depends solely on the number of people who visit and stay on the page. SEO helps a lot in diverting the readers to our content by increasing the visibility of the content. This is related to the ranking of a page. As more and more valid users visit our page, the ranking of the page will be increased.
The pages with the highest ranking are the ones displayed in the initial pages of a browser search. And if you do not understand why this is relevant, think of the last time you actually went to the fifth or sixth or even the second page in a google search. For most of us, the answer is never. Higher the page ranking, the higher the chance of it being visited.
Another reason why SEO blog writing is important is to make the browser understand what your topic is. When your content has the optimized number of keywords targeting a particular topic, it makes it easier for the search engine to understand what our content is all about and what kind of audience it is catering to.
How to make SEO blogs for your website?
Given below are tips and steps you can follow to create an SEO blog. Next time you are about to write a post, you can use this list as an SEO blog checklist. But, keep in mind that the below are only some of the methods through which you can implement SEO in your blog posts.
Check out this guide to create SEO Content to become an SEO expert.
Read about Google Digital Marketing Courses
Keyword Optimization
The most important step in creating SEO-friendly content would be to focus on the keywords. Keywords are certain words or phrases that you can add to the content naturally so that the browser can link it to user searches. But this does not mean that you should start and end your sentence with your keyword. Overcrowding your content with keywords can have quite the opposite effect. Browsers nowadays are equipped to ignore content where this happens.
Keywords can be of two types based on their length. Short tail keywords usually contain one or two words that will be the most searched combination for that topic. Long-tail keywords will have more words and can even be a full sentence depending on the topic. For example, if you are searching for a Content Writing course, the most probable keyword you would use is “Content Writing”. In this case, this can be considered as the short-tail keyword. One of the probable long-tail keywords for the same would be “Top Content Writing Courses in India”.
The next big question on our minds will be how to identify a keyword? Rather than assuming random keywords, there are some applications and sites that will help you identify the most relevant keywords for your niche. Google Keyword Planner, and Keyword tool are some of examples.
Once you have identified your long-tail and short-tail keywords, the best practice is to add these keywords strategically to your content. The first place to start with is your title. Since most of the browsers place more importance on the title keywords, adding the short-tail keywords to your title will be the most effective method.
Along with the title tag, creating H1, H2, and H3 tags and adding relevant keywords to them can also help increase your SEO ranking. The other keywords can be used sparingly and naturally in the rest of your content. You can even add some of the keywords to your content URL and meta tags of the content.
Join IIMSkills’ Content Writing Course to get hands-on experience in content writing.
Backlinks
When you add a link to a page or site in another site, it is called backlinking. This is the easiest way to get traffic, given the original content is popular among readers. Another version of backlinking is called internal linking, where we provide links to our own content rather than an external link.
This can be immensely helpful to attract new visitors to your posts when you have a set of blog posts or topics that has a higher click rate than others. Much like keyword optimization, adding too many links can be detrimental. Make sure that the links you are providing will be useful to a person going through the article.
Mobile friendly
The fact that more and more readers are moving away from desktops and laptops to mobile reading goes without saying. So it would follow that the content we write in our blogs should be focussed on people reading it from mobile screens as well. Also, it is no secret that Google heavily prefers mobile-friendly sites and lists them out first in a google search. Designing a website or blog might not be up your alley, but you can make use of website builder sites like Wix.
SEO Plugins
Even if your website platform claims to be 100% SEO friendly on its own, it never hurts use to boost that with the help of some plugins. If you are someone who enjoys doing the backend stuff of your blog on your own, you can simply use WordPress and its array of plugins to make an excellent SEO-based blog.
Deliver Content
At the end of the day, it does not matter that you have a top-notch SEO blog if you are not actually producing any content. So the obvious step to increase the reach and rank of your content is to produce quality content continuously. Your blog is not going to rank at number 1 even with two posts, even if it has all the SEO tricks and tips out there applied.
Optimize your URL
This might seem irrelevant to you. But the URL of your posts can affect the SEO balance of your content. URLs that are too long have been found to have lower Google rankings than shorter URLs. Customized URLs also allow you to add keywords to them. It can also prevent your content from looking old if it has some date attached to it by default. Also, it does not hurt to have a visually pleasing URL that readers can easily remember, rather than a random string of gibberish.
Image Optimization
If you use images and other media in your blog posts, make sure to optimize them. Reduce the size of your files to the minimum, while also ensuring the appropriate media quality. Image optimization has a huge impact on making a blog SEO-friendly. Removing or reducing the unwanted data from an image can even lead to a reduction of the page data size up to 80%.
Reduce Page Load Time
Directly linked to page data size is the page load time. Studies have shown that a user does not revisit a page if the load time of the page exceeds more than three seconds. For most of the eCommerce sites, this time is around two seconds, while Google has gone on record saying that they always aim for less than half a second.
Reduce your bounce rate
Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who leave the page as soon as they visit it without further exploration. Reducing the bounce rate of your blog and increasing its SEO factor can be considered complementary. As you reduce the bounce rate, the ranking of your site will go up and as the ranking goes up so does the visibility.
Use Social Media
At this stage, Social Media sites can be pretty much used for anything. Right from sending a funny meme to your friend to running a business online, there is no other medium so strong that can increase the visibility of your content. Use your social profiles for SEO purposes. Share the blogs and ask your friends to do the same. Though this step is not something new, it will definitely provide results. Explore more on this here.
Benefits of SEO blogs
We have already seen why SEO is needed. Apart from increasing the visibility, traffic, and ranking of your blog, there are other benefits of applying SEO to your blog content.
Indexed blog pages
Indexed pages refer to pages that are verified by and added to the browser database. Utilizing SEO for blogs can help to increase the number of indexed blog pages. This means that the browser considers the posts to be credible. This in turn can help in increasing the traffic and ranking.
Better Linking
We have seen what backlinks and internal links are. And how they can help in improving the SEO readiness of a post. Likewise, better SEO can lead to better backlinks and internal links as well. This will optimize the blog further for browser searches.
Improved User Interaction
The key ingredient of any blog is the user. The user experience of a well-developed SEO blog will enhance user interactions as well. As the amount of user interaction increases, so does the overall site statistics. ]
Content Quality and freshness
Even though you might feel like following a bunch of steps and conditions every time you write something can be difficult, over time you will find yourself doing it effortlessly. This is going to increase the SEO quality of your content in the long run. Ensuring that the contents are always updated can also mean that you have fresh content.
Financial benefits
At the end of the day, money matters. Without using SEO in your blogs, you will have to spend money on buying ad spaces in case you want to market your content digitally. By making use of SEO and increasing the ranking and traffic of your page organically, search engines might redirect their users to your blog pages. There is also the added benefit of getting paid for ads that are displayed on your blog pages.
Best SEO Tools of 2024
There are countless tools available to bloggers that can be used to identify keywords, analyze, and much more. The below tools can help you to climb to the top of the browser search results.
Google Search Console
This tool provides the details on how the site is viewed by Google. You can view details like the number of clicks, general traffic, and any issues that your site might be facing in terms of SEO rating.
Cognitive SEO
It is an analysis and tracking tool that also provides you access to interactive charts. The tool also provides suggestions on possible improvements that you can make to your blog.
SEMrush
It is an all-rounder tool that helps you with anything and everything SEO. Right from keyword search to analysis and reports, SEMrush has it all.
Ahrefs
This is a research tool that provides information and monitors not only your blog but also your competitions.
Majestic
It is a link profiler tool that provides the data about the backlink situation of your blog as well as your competition’s.
Yoast SEO
Though this is a WordPress plugin and not a tool on its own, Yoast SEO is undoubtedly one of the most powerful contents writing tools. It helps you fine-tune your content to the SEO strategies, while also providing insights while you create your content.
Netpeak Spider
This tool is useful when you want to check the SEO compatibility of existing content in your blog. Netpeak Spider simulates the behavior of the browser crawling robots and sweeps your blogs for notices, issues, or warnings.
Moz Tools
Rather than a single tool, the Moz tool is a collection of resources that helps in different SEO phases and is free of cost.
Google Analytics by Monster Insights
This is one of the simpler tools that is used to insert or update the Google analytics code in your blog manually.
Readability Test Tool
This is a simple tool that analyzes the contents of your blog and provides an estimate of the age of the readers who can read and understand the contents.
KWFinder
KWFinder is a keyword research application that can be used to analyze the backlinks and provide detailed information on the keywords.
Do I Need a Blog in 2024?
This question must have passed your mind while reading this article. Is it worth all the effort to create a blog and then go through all that work to make it SEO-friendly? Do people even read this stuff anymore? Many people feel that the time of blogs is past and they are of no value-generating purposes. But, the actual truth of the matter is far from this. Blogs are not dead at all.
The average blogger out there, who does nothing more than post the occasional life update or the meticulously planned SEO content that has no life or soul, may not think that blogs are a thing of the digital market space. But blogs have been identified as a marketing priority by a HubSpot study. People who are interested and have a passion for something will try to get more details on it. And blogs and social media are some ways to get this data.
Platform to share
The content aims to share information. Blogs provide an easy, simple, and accessible solution to our need to share. It could be creating content like stories or poems, or other content like self-motivation, productivity, health blogs, cooking blogs, etc.
Business
Though blogging might have started with the need to share, it has changed into much more of a business nowadays. People have even started blogging professionally. This has led to an increase in the quality as well as quantity of the blog contents out there. The competition factor has wildly increased over the years as well.
Blogging to build your business
This has turned out to be the most common type of blogging in current times. Traditional and eCommerce businesses can be easily marketed through online media. The capital, as well as the efforts required, is less compared to offline marketing, and the return on investment is quite high.
Online space provides a higher number of audience and blog posts combined with other social media or eCommerce websites provide an excellent opportunity to improve and increase the business and the customer range.
Build a Portfolio
If you are a freelance content creator, you have to have a portfolio. Whether you are a writer or creator, you need a space to display your work and attract clients with a minimum capital cost. Blogs are an ideal way to implement this.
You can showcase your best works and display not only your grasp in the area of writing but also digital marketing and SEO practices. By building up the traffic and readership of your blogs, you can be sure to make better contacts as well as get noticed by better clients for your next writing job.
Build a Personal Brand
Building a personal brand is important in anything you do. The concept of personal brands has been greatly influenced by the YouTubers out there. Today, you can find channels on YouTube for anything and everything. Most of these people try to build up their brand and use it to venture into their own eCommerce or training businesses.
A big reason why these people are successful is owing to their personal brand. The product itself might not have attracted the customers, but adding the personal brand of the person helps a lot in marketing the product without actually needing to spend much on the actual marketing process.
Final Thoughts
So now that we have established how good SEO blogs are for increasing the reach of your content, does that the quality of the writing not count? Of course not. Content Writing, ultimately, is about content. Content is still the king in content copy. But having these tips and tricks just enhances the number of audiences to whom the content is being delivered.
The digital world is ever-expanding. There is no fixed formula to win. The concept of SEO, like anything else, is vulnerable to changes and new trends at any time. Keep yourself updated with the latest trends from reliable sources.
Frequently Asked Questions- FAQs
Q1. What are the qualifications required to be SEO?
There is no specified degree needed for SEO analyst. The applicant can apply for a degree in mass communication or computer science. Also, a diploma or a certification in digital marketing is also enough to apply for SEO opportunities.
Q2. What is the beginners salary of an SEO?
The basic average salary an SEO earns is 1.8 Lakhs per annum.
Q3. Are there age limits to pursue an SEO course?
Not as such. There are no upper age limits to pursue an SEO course. But in some institutions the minimum age bar is 18years for the course due to safety considerations and legalities.
