Photo Credit: spcbrass
As I mentioned in a previous post, my strategy going forward is not to worry too much about search engine optimization, but rather to focus on getting your great content in front of influencers in your niche to naturally attract visitors who will link to you and share your content on Twitter or Facebook. Of course, this isn’t easy, and could take a long time, but escaping the rat race requires patience, focus, and determination.
That being said, there are still a few tips and tricks you can employ right now on your website that will benefit both your visitors and your visibility in the search rankings. Each tip only takes a few seconds, and most bloggers are just wasting these opportunities right under their noses to get more traffic because they simply don’t think about them.
5 Blogging Tips You Probably Aren’t Taking Advantage Of
1. Internal Linking
When you link from one page of your blog/site to another page on your blog/site, that is called an internal link. Here is an example of an internal link: it goes from this post to my About Page.
- For visitors, internal links are good because they give the reader more references and relevant direction on your site.
- For search engines, internal links are good because they give the search-engine spiders the impression that the linked content is important.
A general principle is that links are like “votes.” The more votes (links) a site has, the higher it ranks in the Google results. Of course this is over simplified and ranking high in Google is more complicated, but you get the general idea. You can think of an internal link as a vote for yourself.
Another Internal Linking Tip: As soon as you publish a new post on your blog, that does not necessarily mean that Google knows it exists. The new post has to go into Google’s index of web pages first, and that does not always happen immediately. But internal linking to your new post can help Google find your content and index it faster.
2. Use More Videos
People love videos. Think about it– Online, we are pretty lazy. Myself included. Would you rather read a bunch of text or watch a video that communicates the exact same message? Of course we like to read, but sometimes throwing a video in the mix can be more valuable.
So, using video helps your site visitors, because it gives them a variety of methods to get information. Video is more entertaining than
Photo Credit: Newsbie Pix
reading. And some people learn better visually or auditorily (is that a word?), so having videos on your site is useful all around.
Having video on your site also helps your search engine rankings. Why? There are two reasons.
- Having videos on your site is just another way to add “value” to your readers, in Google’s eyes. Also, it is natural for blogs to contain a few posts with videos and not just boring text.
- Google records how long a visitor stays on your site. If they stay on your site for a longer time, then that must mean your content is great. Otherwise, the visitor would just bounce off your site and go somewhere else. Obviously then, video encourages people to stay on your site longer, which could have an impact on your search rankings and stats.
Using more videos is definitely something I can work on and I hope to roll some out in the near future. There really are no excuses, because I can use my cell phone to make a decent video and upload it to WordPress.
3. Use more Images
Again, pictures help the readers. They spice things up a little bit. They can help get your point across. I think the saying “A Picture is worth 1,000 words” is relevant here. I don’t think I really need to explain any further why it’s a good idea to put pictures on your blog.
An old on-site SEO trick was to name the picture file you were uploading onto your blog the same as the keywords you were targeting. For example, if you were targeting the keywords “how to quit my job“, then before uploading a picture, you could name the file “how-to-quit-my-job.png” or something similar. For all you HTML folks out there, you could also put your keywords in the alternate text attribute (alt tag) of your HTML code.
To an extent, I think this still works, but Google doesn’t like pages that appear over-optimized for keywords. The key is to make it look natural. So I wouldn’t go around naming all the files names of your pictures with keywords. And with the alt tags, I would put relevant description of what the picture actually is. In other words, don’t go overboard with naming your images and putting all of your keywords in your alt tags.
4. Make your Posts Easy on the eyes by Using Bullets and Lists
Most people love to scan blog posts and don’t always read the whole thing. If your text is too boring or too long and intimidating, they might get bored and go to another site.
Two ways you can make your content scan-able are by using more bullets or numbered lists. You don’t always have to use bullets and lists, but try to make your content look nice, presentable, and easy to follow.
5. A Few Extra Tips
I also try to link at least once to another external site, such as Wikipedia or CNN or any other established site. You don’t have to do
Photo Credit: ~fyrfli~
this, but I do it because it looks natural and I want to help my readers, especially if they want to see something interesting or want to see something in more detail than I explained on the blog post.
Some argue that this could take your readers away from your blog. And maybe it can distract them a little. But I try to provide the best information I can, so I am not worried about linking to other sites. I also always make sure the link opens in a new tab, so that they don’t leave your site. Just make sure you check the “Open page in a new window/tab” when you make a insert the hyperlink link on WordPress. Some people say that linking to external sites gets rid of your link juice. For a more through explanation on what link juice is, click here.
But one way to combat losing “link juice” or “link power” is by making the external links on your site nofollow, with this free WordPress plugin which I use.
In the spirit of simplicity, and since I don’t want to confuse some readers, you can see what a nofollow link is here.
Conclusion
These extra blogging steps take mere minutes. Small changes can yield big results. I encourage you to employ some of these on your sites, and see how your stats increase over the long haul. Notice how you are not spending hours manually building links, or worrying about things outside your control. Most bloggers don’t do this, so you can use this strategy to one-up your competition, and giving readers more opportunity to turn into return visitors.
As always, if you enjoyed this post, comment below and share it with your friends.