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Some bloggers write for passion whereas some writes for
money and some for both. But for that people should visit the blog. That's
officially called Search Engine Optimisation.
Let's cut it
down one by one.
Design your blog by yourself. Read this 2 minute read simple tutorial.
Level One
1. GET RID OF THOSE UGLY URLs
Can you guess what you will see after clicking the first
link? Yeah, me neither. Maybe it’s something about AIaIQobChMIlNfX44yU2Q or
AiAAEgLRnPD_BwE&gclsrc=a. Who knows?
But I’m fairly confident that under the second link there
is a blog post about website performance. You get me?
This distinction is not only important for users. Even
Google recommends paying attention to your URLs structure on their webmaster
blog.
Summarizing Google’s recommendations on URLs, you should:
·
Keep them as simple as possible.
·
Try to make them intelligible to humans.
·
Use hyphens to separate words.
·
Be careful with parameters.
·
And remember that you have to set a redirect when
beautifying those URLs.
2. SIZE MATTERS
Or rather, word count matters. A short story is usually
defined by having between 1,000 to 30,000 words.
A novel is generally viewed
as having 40,000 words or more. For perspective, the first Harry Potter book –
the shortest in the series – had 76,944 words.
But, when it comes to writing your blog, your job is not
to be Stephen King. While Google appreciates a high word count, readers
generally have anxiety when they stare at a long scroll bar on the side of your
content.
To start with, try not to write less than 500 words. And
then try not to go above 2,000 words (which is about the right length for
someone to read in one sitting). That said, sometimes your content is full of
gold and you have 11 things you want to write about.
The trick is to find the right balance that works for
your readers and crawlers. And once you get that right, then you need to start
thinking about keywords.
3. KEYWORD RESEARCH
Whether you’re writing a paragraph or an epic, none of it
really matters without some quality keywords to get Google’s attention. This is
why it’s important that you do your research.
There are some great tools you can use to find keywords
that are relevant to your content, many of which you might not have thought of.
For instance, there’s Answer the Public, which provides you with possible
questions (keyword possibilities) that could lead readers to your blog.
I put in blogging into Answer the Public, and I got a visualization like this: And that’s only the tip of the iceberg for what they
present.
If keyword research is something that strikes your fancy,
then you’re going to love #4.
Level Two
All right! You survived Level One! Let’s turn up the
difficulty just a little bit and take a look at some more tips.
4. TF*IDF – THE ALGORITHM TO RULE THEM ALL
TF*IDF is probably one of those things you’ve never heard
of, like the name of the thing that hangs in the back of your throat (uvula, by
the way!).
TF*IDF is an algorithm used to see how many times a keyword appears
in any content and then determines the word’s importance, or weight, in the content
itself.
Once that is established, the algorithm can then figure out the weight
of the keyword in relation to how many times it appears throughout the web.
Basically, the more the word weighs, the rarer it is –
meaning, the more value the keyword has to your content and search engines.
You really should read Bartosz Góralewicz’s “The TF*IDF
Algorithm Explained” because of his step-by-step guide on how to effectively
utilize the algorithm is an invaluable resource for content writers and
bloggers alike.
5. SPEED UP YOUR WEBSITE
It is extremely important that your website is loading
promptly.
53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than three
seconds to load.
Nobody wants to wait for the page to load.
Do you know who else doesn’t like waiting for your
website to load? Crawlers.
And this is a serious problem, especially when taking
your crawl budget into consideration.
The crawl budget is “the number of pages Googlebot will
regularly crawl based on the size and cleanliness of your site, as well as the number of links directing the crawler to your site.”
Generally speaking, The longer it takes for Googlebot to crawl your website, the greater the possibility that your website won’t rank.
You can check your website’s speed by simply pasting your
website’s URL in Google PageSpeed Insights. Or use any other commercial tool
like GTmetrix or WebPageTest.
If you’re using
WordPress CMS, you can read about how to reduce WordPress Load Time. And if
your blog uses international languages like Spanish or English, try using a
Content Delivery Network (CDN). This will decrease the loading time for your
international readers.
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