2 Easy SEO Tricks for Your Blog
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
Let me start by saying the most important and easy SEO trick to know is writing good quality content every day. Or as often as possible.
There is simply no better way to generate traffic to your website than to write original content. This is the hard part and the reason many bloggers fail and quit early. Keep at it and be consistent. The results will follow.
Let’s assume you’re already writing in your blog and want to get better results. Here are 2 easy SEO tricks that will make all the difference. Please know that these strategies are for people who are serious about generating traffic to their blog over a long-term. For short term success, you may consider PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising.
These are easy SEO tricks that if you do, it will increase your expose dramatically in search results. Some of these tricks are exclusively for WordPress.
Easy SEO Trick #1: On-page SEO
Step #1 – Topic Research
Choose a focused topic for your blog that is something people actually WANT to read about. It can be anything at all but my favourite categories are: Current events and hot topic discussions because many people are searching for these topics online. Summarize the topic as a keyword. For example on this post, my keyword is Easy SEO.
Step #2 – Keyword Research
To find out exactly what people are searching and what gets the most traffic, use Google’s Keyword Tool – https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Step #3 – Content
Use that keyword in your blog title, your headers and casually within your body content. Also use your keyword is the first and last sentence of your post.
Be aware that Google will penalize you if you over-use your keyword. Higher than 3% density for your keyword is considered “keyword stuffing” so be careful. If you’re using WordPress, use the SEO Score plugin (highly recommended!!)
Step #4 – Images
Add images to your post. Not only does this make your blog post more visually interesting, but it’s another opportunity to add your topic keyword. Also search engines don’t know what the image is unless you tell it, so always add the Alternate text and Title for your images. Not sure the difference between the two? Read about it here.
Step #5 – Emphasis
Give attention to your keywords by bolding and italicizing them. Google reads the source code and determines that these words are important.
Step #6 – Blog Post Length
How long should your blog post be? As a good rule of thumb, 500-700 words appears to be recommended length for the right amount of content for SEO. Make sure your blog has a Word Counter plugin so that you have a reference point.
Step #7 – Internal Linking
Link your blog post to another page or post within your blog using your keyword as the “anchor text”.
As a bonus if the website you link to is another WordPress website, they’ll be notified and may choose to link back to your site. This is a called a linkback and helps generate traffic.
Easy SEO Trick #2: Off-page SEO
Step #1 – Create a Pingback (WordPress only)
1) Google the keyword that you chose for your blog post and then link to it and reference it
within your post.
2) Choose a post that is related to the topic of your blog post and copy the permalink for
that blog post. (Copy the URL from the address bar while you are viewing the other blogger’s post.)
3) Reference the post as another source that verifies what you are saying and then link to it within your post.
By doing this easy SEO trick, you validate what your post is about by showing that others have the same opinion and that what you are talking about is important because other people are also talking about it.
Step #2 – Syndication
Syndication services will publish the content of your blog to other sources automatically from your blog’s RSS feed. Every blog has a feed, you just need to copy and paste it.
My feed is shown here:
My Syndication tool of choice ping.fm was recently purchased by Seesmic. I have researched a few other replacements that you can use:
Read this great post that talks more about SEO strategies.
There are many other SEO strategies that can be used. If you use these 2 easy SEO tricks, you’ll be giving search engines what they want while still writing good quality content. Happy blogging.