Your success or failure at blogging largely depends on whether you follow the basic rules of SEO. With the explosion of tips about succeeding at SEO in the internet, it can be confusing for bloggers and writers to know which advise to follow. To make things easier for you, here are some tried and tested guidelines:
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Ensure You Have A Clean Domain
Your internet visibility vastly depends on the history of your domain. If you’re not careful, you could find yourself purchasing a domain that has Google penalties. A domain with penalties has limited Google traffic. Even with successful SEO results, a strong online presence today goes beyond just search ranking and requires audience engagement. Regardless of whether you love or hate the company, it’s a well-known fact that you won’t be able to do much on the internet without Google. And so you’d want to be on their good side if you’re to benefit from search engine optimization.
Google penalties are a direct result of breaking the laws associated with Google search algorithms. In your quest to get that much-needed traffic to your website, you might be tempted to use tricks that could get you penalized or blacklisted. It often takes a while to undo the consequences of Google penalties. Therefore, always adhere to Google webmaster guidelines to keep your site clean.
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Use A Professional-looking Website
Never take the design and general appearance of your website lightly. A site with an SEO-friendly design is more likely to attract search engines and other users than those that don’t. SEO-friendly websites are easily accessible and can be indexed by a search engine. Effective digital marketing practices incorporate SEO guidelines to improve website visibility and organic search traffic.
When coming up with your web design, always have search engines in mind. If you attract search engines, you’re more likely to get much-needed traffic to your site. To ensure your site is fully indexable, consider the following:
- Use Alt text to describe images on your site clearly.
- Provide transcripts for videos and audios.
- Use an SEO writing checker for improved content quality.
- Use an SEO browser if you want to be sure that the content on your site is indexable and crawlable.
- Keep the architecture of your website simple.
- Have unique content on your site.
- Use URLs that describe your page.
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Develop A Fast Website
In today’s culture of consumers wanting instant results, online speed is everything. In fact, speed is now a ranking factor on Google. The goal for most search engines is to provide users with information in the shortest possible time.
If your site opens pages faster than others, it’ll most likely encourage users to open more than one page. Some studies have suggested that the rate of conversion is higher with websites that have fast-opening pages. Like Google, your aim should be to give your visitors what they need in the shortest time possible.
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Prove Your Expertise
Google rankings now use what’s known as the EAT, which means Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness. It’s not enough to claim that you’re an expert in your field. You now have to demonstrate your credibility through the blogs on your site. After all, visitors on your site want to know they’re dealing with an expert if they’re to turn into customers.
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Try Long-form Quality Content
If you want your site to get high rankings, you have to strike a balance between quantity and quality. While it may seem true that the shorter the blog content, the better the response, longer articles seem to have higher rankings than shorter ones. Depending on your niche, if your content consists of 1,500 well-written words, you’re likely to get a better ranking than a shorter one, especially if it’s poorly written.
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Write SEO Friendly Blog Posts
Writing SEO blog posts is a charm. Although it sounds technical and complicated, it’s not that hard. All you need is practice. The structure of your blog post and the formatting of your text, paragraphs, and headings have a significant role in your search rankings.
An SEO-friendly blog won’t only get you better chances of top rankings, but it’ll also be user-friendly. Your blog has to have content that both search engines and your site visitors can understand. Meeting the two demands will get you higher rankings.
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Study On-Page SEO
On-page SEO refers to optimization of the pages on your website so that they get better rankings and online traffic. It includes your content and the HTML source code of a page on your site. Following SEO guidelines like keyword research and content creation can pave the way for higher SEO rankings. On-page SEO helps search engines understand the content on your site a better. Because search engines now analyze data relevance, knowing how on-page SEO works could be an advantage for the success of your SEO results.
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Use Social Media
You need to go on one of the social media platforms to fully understand that social media marketing is the new key to increasing the traffic to your site. Social media is undoubtedly one of the most effective ways of marketing today. Take advantage of this and market your site.
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Use Off-Page SEO With Caution
Off-page SEO involves aspects like hyperlink building and social media management. Be careful not to create poor quality links and employing unprofessional SEO companies who could get your site penalized or suspended.
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Be True To Your Audience
At the end of the day, you blog for people. Without them, your site would be useless. Stay attentive and give your audience what they’re looking for when they visit your blog. Give them accurate, up-to-date, and accessible information. As far as blogging is concerned, the audience is your greatest priority.
Take-Home
Blogging success is not an event; it’s a process. You have to put in the work. Stick to these tried and tested methods and stay away from quick fixes. Be patient and give your audience quality content. Gradually, you’ll see the positive results coming to fruition.
