Blogging Basics: SEO For New Bloggers

I recently asked on Instagram stories what blogging specific post my audience wanted to see, to my delight the response to my poll was SEO for New Bloggers. So here I am today sharing all of my SEO tips and tricks for beginners. Don’t get me wrong I am absolutely new to the blogging world so this post is just me sharing what I have learned along the way/ what hours of reading & research have taught me.

As a new blogger, I am sure you hear about SEO all the time but what is SEO? SEO stands for search engine optimization and refers to the practice of increasing the amount of traffic to your site by improving organic search results.

The goal of implementing an SEO strategy on your site is to improve your ranking on search engines. The search engines I get most of my blog views from are google and bing, this past month, over 50% of my blog views came directly from Google.

If you google, Estee Lauder Double Wear Foundation Dupe, my blog post is the second result that comes up. While this might seem like a very specific thing to search, I get 1000 blog views to this post from Google a month! I’ve only been blogging a few months so 1000 views to a blog post a month from Google is a complete success to me!

SEO for New Bloggers: Increase your Blog Views

When first implementing an SEO strategy one of the most important aspects is Keywords. Keywords are at the core of SEO. A keyword is a word or phrase in your web content that makes it possible for people to find your site via search engines. The goal of SEO is to rank in the top search engine results pages for your chosen keywords.

Keywords For SEO

Finding Successful Keywords

Your SEO strategy should start with identifying successful keywords. These should be words and phrases related to your blog post topic that people are regularly searching for.

Lets’ go through my strategy when it comes to keywords. I start by writing down the most generic topic for the blog post I am working on. Say it is March and I am working on a blog post about dresses, the keywords I would start with would be “Spring Fashion”. That would be the overarching keywords then I would break it down to more specific phrases that further describe my blog post such as Spring Dresses, Spring Fashion For Women, Spring Fashion For Work, Spring Outfits, etc.

Now that I have my list of generic keywords all written down, I am going to take this list and start plugging it in to search engines as well as Pinterest. I am going to write down the top results from that search on my keyword sheet. This tactic should leave you with roughly 25 – 30 keywords and phrases. Later in this post, I am going to refer to this as my list of researched keywords and phrases.

Using keywords

Now that you have the keywords, there are some general guidelines on where to place the keywords. The most important places to place keywords are in the subject, the first paragraph, the several headings throughout your blog post, the ALT – Text ( I’ll talk more about this in a bit) and the closing paragraph.

One last thing about keywords, do not overstuff your content. Search engines are VERY smart and overusing keywords throughout your post does not work. Use your keywords naturally because a blog post overstuffed with keywords can get penalized.

Now that keywords are out of the way, lets talk about all the other basic guidelines that will increase your search engine ranking.

Write An Actual Blog Post!

Here’s my rant of the day – one of my biggest pet peeves is when I see someone has a new blog post and then I click to read their post and the post is a few words and a few pictures! If you have a committed Instagram following that clicks on everything you post then maybe a short post is okay but if you are looking to diversify your audience and increase your SEO, then that is absolutely NOT OKAY! Your blog post must be at least 300 words! At least! To increase your SEO you need more text, in the way of SEO, more text better SEO.

In addition to the length of the post, regularly posting new content is very important. If you want to take your blog seriously than you should be consistently writing new blog posts. Search engines love websites that add fresh content. To increase traffic to your blog, you should be writing at least one blog post a week.

Research Trending Topics

If the subject matter of your blog post is not regularly being searched for, then the chances of the blog post being seen on search engines is slim. I rely heavily on social sites (Pinterest & Instagram) to keep a pulse on which topics are trending and what topics will attract my intended audience.

Add SEO Plugins

There are tons of SEO resources out there, use them! I use WordPress as my hosting site and have installed Yoast to help with all things SEO. Yoast is a great resource that provides tons of recommendations that help increase my search engine ranking.

Provide ALT – Text For All Of Your Images

ALT text is a readable description of the images on your blog. When it comes to ALT-text, what I like to do is take a keyword from my researched list and use that as the ALT- text. Like I’ve stated before, I use WordPress for my blog and they make it very easy to change the ALT -text on my images.

Beyond ALT- Text, make sure that all file names are also SEO friendly. Change your generic file names (such as IMG22545.jpg) to a keyword from your researched list or a short text describing what it is. If your keyword is a phrase, use hyphens to separate the words (hyphens are read as spaces on search engines).

This is the very simple, basic elementary introduction to SEO. Take these tips and implement them into your next blog post and let me know the results, I would love to see/ hear your results!

I am working on a bit more advanced level SEO post and can’t wait to share that because I have a lot to say about long tail keywords and audience behavior.

Blogging and techniques that increase my blog views is something I am very passionate about so if you are ever looking for someone to chat all things blogging, I would love to be your girl.