Find me! Find me!
We all hope that our SEO knowledge and efforts can help us rank a little higher on Google. You certainly don’t have to be a superhero to boost your pages and your posts but you need a little bit of know how. A few tips to help get your blog seen, read, and shared.
Inbound marketing and alleged best practices are changing all of the time. It can prove challenging to stay up to date, never mind modifying everything you do on a daily basis. Read, learn and understand the basics. Never stop educating yourself. Employ and test different tips and tools. Find what works for you and your audience. Stay social!!! Engage and share.
“This type of person thinks that they need to know everything and never implement anything that they learn. If you want to succeed you must take action now and start learning from your failures. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t learn, what it means is that you need to implement what you learn and see what works best for you and your market.” Garret Peirson – searchenginejournal.com
Writing rich and valuable content is to serve and engage your audience; to solve their biggest pain points and enrich their brain matter. Think about the reasons you are drawn to particular posts, bloggers or other newsworthy sites. Write the blog posts that capture and maintain your audience.
“The success of a page should be measured by one criteria: Does the visitor do what you want them to do?” Aaron Wall
Google rewards remarkable content, the customer experience and social engagement. Google’s mission is to retrieve data that is relevant and useful to the user’s search query based upon their algorithm and several other factors related to SEO, relevance, popularity, quality and content.
“Content is the atomic particle of all digital marketing.” Rebecca Lieb
What satiates your appetite for knowledge?
You probably have some favorite “go to” sites and authors of your own but when you are searching for more data or need to answer a question, how do you retrieve the information?
KISS Your SEO
- When you start your post, consider: What is the core challenge or problem your article will help your audience to solve?
- Understand your consumers and what motivates them.
- You use a string of words versus just one key phrase.
- How does your audience search?
- What means the most to them?
- Your goal is to optimize your post with longtail keywords and phrases that would be a deeper representation of what your ideal buyer persona is looking for.
- Communicate without selling. Tell your story, offering solutions. Tweaking the ache for answers and information.
- Your content and keywords should serve your audience and their topics of interest NOT the search engines.
- Internal links within your site help to increase your rankings and direct readers to your other posts and pages, further enriching their experience.
- Make sure your metadata, including your image descriptions include your keywords.
- Updating existing content WordPress content also tells the search engines that your content is still relevant and current.
- Leverage your Google+ profile for better return on posts. Don’t forget the hashtags too.
According MOZ, here is the basic beginner checklist for SEO keywords in your blog post:
- At least once in the main title (H1).
- At least in one or two headings.
- At least 3 times in the body of the article.
- At least once in “bold” and “italics”.
- At least once in the “Alt” of a picture (below we’ll show you how to do it and why).
- Once in the URL.
- At least once in the Meta description.
Your KISS SEO strategy is just one simple step toward moving your blog post up the ranks in the search engines and gaining social merit. Remember to add social share buttons on each post, share it in your communities, syndicate it on various social channels and sites, ping each time you post, comment on other blog posts, engage your audience and most of all:
BE social. Don’t DO social.
A great outline to follow, I try and use a few of these myself but my main goal was to improve the transition from the thoughts from my head to words. Then trying to incorporate keywords, I know for me that is the hardest part. The other challenge I face is actually finding keywords to focus on that fit with what I am thinking of, I tend to focus on the same old keywords which do produce but not add to a range and variety I would like to have within my own blog.
I am making success though, several months ago I ranked in the hundreds for fine art landscape photography, a very competitive keyword, now I rank in the low 30’s.
Search plays the largest volume in building a community, I say a community but I don’t get as many comments as I do visits though. I’m ok with that for now though, I think if I had more of a focus on photography education and less on connecting with potential customers my comments would grow. My thought is when I read a blog about social media, it’s not potential clients asking questions but other social bloggers adding their input.
Thanks for the tips and reinforcing the ideas I need to implement.
Ed
Thank you Ed.
You are great with comments and engagement. The SEO is so important to help you be found by the search engines and your community as well. When you are writing, you need to write for your audience and their pain points. In thinking of your keyword phrases, you try to get in their heads about what they are searching for. Using a single word is many times too broad – that is why using keyword phrases can help further drill down to your target market search queries. Your focus keywords should be in the blog title, meta descriptions, images and body. You certainly don’t want overkill so it gets spammy, but it helps the search engines find you based upon user needs.
I would think you want a mix of building your community, photography education and connecting with your prospects. It all works together. Your images are beautiful!! You have to know where your audience lives and meet them there toe engage.
I am happy there were some useful tips for you Ed. Again, I appreciate the conversation.
Suzie