Blog marketing and monetization is a rigorously growing industry, attracting large businesses as well as home-based startups. While creating and running a blog may be fairly simple, the big blow comes when you realize your blog isn’t getting the traffic you expected it to generate! Naturally, the amount of visitors you get is directly related to the amount of money you will be able to make, so low rankings can come as a huge setback.
If you are a relatively new blogger aiming to rank higher in search engines, you need to realize that the competition is fierce; it is only through in-depth on-page SEO techniques that you will eventually be able to appear on the first page of giant search engines like Google. Here are a few tips to help you achieve this:
1. Psychologically Exploit Your Keywords
You may have been focusing on getting a certain keyword ranked, but have you taken into consideration whether it is a clickable keyword? To rank better, think of keywords incorporating words like tips, guide, top 5, etc.; get into the reader’s mind.
2. Optimize Your Titles
Once you’ve found the perfect keyword, make sure it is strategically placed into the SEO title of your blogpost. Ideally, keep the title below 59 characters and add the keyword in the first half. To further improve effectiveness, make sure the same keyword appears in your URL.
3. Link Internal Blogposts
If you take a look at successful blogs, you will always find hyperlinks within them that lead to other blog posts on the same website. Linking to your own related posts can dramatically increase search engine rankings, though you should preferably have your keyword as part of the hyperlink to make this work.
More importantly, the link needs to architecturally structured into the writing in a way that it flows perfectly – providing added value without contributing to distraction.
4. Add Keywords to Photos and Videos
Several bloggers add keywords to their written content but not to their media files. However, photo and video searches account for a majority of search engine entries, so taking a minute to modify your captions and alt tags will go a long way.
Ideally, your alt tag must be your focus keyword; the latter must also appear in your caption. To make sure this doesn’t turn out to be futile, always relate your keyword to the image, making it more clickable when it does appear in image searches.
5. Social Media Sharing
If you haven’t been exploring the massive world that social media marketing is, you need to start doing it right now! It is a statistical fact that a certain webpage will rank higher in search engines if it comes from more than one source.
Sharing your blog post on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. will not only increase direct reach but will also make it easier for Google to find it when related keywords are entered.
In addition to these tips, make sure your blog’s content is well-written and purposeful and provides value to the reader. Long gone are the days when you could stuff keywords into a post and expect it to rank high. Now, it is going to take both hard work and strategy – and the best combination wins!
