Creating Content for Blog Excellence: Goal #3
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
I’m coming to you with part 4 of my Creating Content for Blog Excellence series – all about creating content with a purpose. I’ve outlined goal #3 below – ranking in the search engines. If you missed the 1st two goals, you can fine them here: Goal #1 & Goal #2
#3 – Ranking in Search Engines
Ranking in the search engines means that your blog posts can be easily found by looking for a given “keyword” (i.e. a search term or phrase) when looking for information on the topic using a search engine like Google or Yahoo. By ranking well on the search engines, your blog post will be found “naturally” by Internet users, resulting in traffic to your blog! Ideally, the goal is to have your blog post ranking on the first page of Google for your chosen keyword, preferably in the top 3 spots. In order to accomplish this goal, you’ve got to focus on three things:
- Keyword research – this can be a rather involved topic, but basically you need to find keywords that are actually being searched for and that are not too competitive.
- On Page Optimization – this is very simple when it comes to WordPress blogs. All you have to do is make sure that you include your keyword in the post title, that you add it to your tags, and that you use it a few times throughout your blog post content.
- Off Page Optimization – this involves building links back to your blog post (i.e.”backlinks”) from other websites. You can accomplish this by doing various types of link building, including social bookmarking, blog commenting, content marketing, and more.
Once you’ve accomplished these three goals, ranking in the search engines will get easier. This is a blogging goal that quite honestly is at the top of my list for ALL of my posts. When you have several posts ranking on the search engines than your blog will begin to generate traffic consistently.