The Importance of SEO For Bloggers

What I Wish I Knew About SEO Before I Started Blogging

When I first started blogging, I thought it just involved a bit of writing and publishing. I was very naive and soon found out there is so much more to it than that. What I wish I knew was the importance of SEO for bloggers to gain traffic to my site.

What is Exactly is SEO?

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the way in which search engines, such as Google, Bing and Pinterest search for keywords. When a user inputs data, the search engines scour the internet and attempt to locate these keywords within websites.

Type a phrase into the Google search bar and you will see a number of phrases appear in a drop-down box. These are commonly searched keywords that Google auto-populates.

These are also key phrases you should be adding to your blog post or article to assist Google or other search engines in ranking your website higher than others.

The Importance of SEO For Bloggers

Okay, you might be thinking “well why is SEO so important for bloggers?” I thought the same thing at first and continued writing my blog posts without researching what SEO was all about.

Major error. Why? Because it made my job so much harder in the long run.

Once I finally decided I loved this blogging thing, I decided I wanted to really start promoting my blog. I wanted people to read my content. So, I started researching SEO. I realised the importance of it regarding “organic traffic” aka traffic that lands on your site through website keyword searches.

What I discovered was I really should’ve attempted to understand the importance of SEO sooner. That is if I wanted people to find my site.

In simple terms, the importance of SEO for bloggers is this – embed a keyphrase into your blog post and you will rank higher on the results page than others. This will equal more “organic” traffic to your blog.

The Best SEO Plugin Tool

So, now I understood the importance of SEO for bloggers, I discovered the “Yoast” SEO plugin. I downloaded it and ran it over my old blog posts. What I found wasn’t good. The SEO analysis of all of my old blog posts was poor.

So, I began at the beginning and started adjusting all of my old posts. This, needless to say, was an extremely time-consuming exercise. I’ll be honest, I still have a few old posts that need amending.

Due to this, I could be missing out on organic traffic. Not great if you are wanting to monetise your blog.

Wanting to try Yoast? Download it here —–> Yoast SEO Plugin

The Importance of SEO Moving Forward

Now, when writing a blog post, I have the Yoast plugin open and amend my post as I go. Once I have all green lights, then I publish. If it finds any errors, then I correct before the post is published.

How Does Yoast Work?

Yoast reviews each blog post and scores it on certain points. These points then convert to an overall score, giving you an end result of “grey” “orange” or “green” scores.

The aim is to get both the “SEO Analysis” and “Readability Analysis” into the green and you’re good to go.

The “Readability Analysis” function gives results on the following areas:

• Flesch Reading Ease (a test used to measure how easy or hard the article is to read)
• Passive Voice
• Consecutive Sentences – Measuring the variety in the sentences to ensure they aren’t all the same
• Subheading Distribution – Assists in the ease of reading
• Paragraph Length – Ensures each paragraph isn’t too long to assist the ease of reading
• Sentence Length
• Transition Words

The “SEO Analysis” function gives results in the following areas:

• Outbound Links – Links to external websites
• Internal Links – Links to other areas of your blog or website
• Meta description/Length – The excerpt which is seen underneath the title of the article/blog post to gives readers an idea of what the article/blog post is about
• Keyphrase – Setting a keyphrase to assist with SEO and allows search engines to understand what the article is about
• Image Alt Attributes – Putting descriptions in the “alt attributes” section of each image which again assists search engines in understanding what the article is about
• SEO Title – Ensuring there is a set SEO keyphrase in the title and lower subheadings
• Keyphrase – Ensuring the keyphrase (which search engines will search for) is located in certain areas of the article or blog post
• Text Length
• Keyphrase Density

The End Result

The end result for me is increased traffic to my blog. Also, it has assisted me in writing better articles, that are more easily searchable and easier to read.

If you are thinking of starting a blog or are currently blogging and you don’t use “Yoast” I highly recommend you download it!

Best of all, it is free!

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