Site traffic is very important to your success as a blogger. This article looks at how you can optimize your blog content. There is a lot you can do yourself; you can find plenty of useful articles and resources available online. I have included some of what I have done below in my eight years as a blogger. Although if you do not feel confident doing it yourself you do have other options.

Hire Someone To Help

You might find it overwhelming knowing where to start. There is a lot to wade through after all! However you can always look for a seo company in united kingdom to give you a helping hand.  They will have the knowledge and skills to optimize your blog for you. It’s a good idea if you have budget available to get support as they will no doubt speed up the process.

Use Available Plugins

If you decide to attempt it yourself there are lots of plugins that can help so don’t feel disheartened. I really like using the free version of Yoast myself.  It’s important to make sure every article you write is SEO friendly and Yoast makes that so much easier to do. The helpful traffic light system on the plugin lets you know how you’re doing. I aim to get each article I write green for readability and SEO. It is a great way to get prompts about what you need to do and has made a difference in terms of my sites success. I make sure I include my focus keyword enough times for the length of the text. Plus I always take time to write my meta description and always include enough content in the article.

How Long Should Your Articles Be?

Ideally you want to aim for over 1,000 words for a better chance of ranking on search engines. I think we are all guilty of including short blog posts on occasion, written in a hurry because we feel we need to get some kind of update live on our blog. Basically, you do not want anything less than 300 at the very minimum.

I used to regularly join in a linky with other bloggers where I would include a picture and only a handful of words. When I did a SEO overhaul of my site, I quickly addressed this issue in an attempt to optimize my blog. Since then, I have made sure all my posts are usually about 500 words. I still have work to do to reach the lofty heights of 1,000+ word articles. They are very few and far between on my site. However, my good intentions are paying off regardless as more of my blog posts are being indexed all the time. I just know with a bit more effort I could achieve better results again!

Create A Site Map

It’s a good idea to create a site map straight away. It helps with navigation and makes your site easier to crawl. Don’t forget to submit it to Google too. You want search engines to find your pages as quickly as possible. The site map gives them a good idea of the layout of your blog so search engines and spiders can do a better job of crawling it.

Use Relevant Keywords

It’s important to do your research before picking keywords. It might be tempting to pluck them out of thin air, but we should be finding out what people are searching for at the moment and piggyback off that. Keep up with current trends as that will also give you ideas about what keywords to use in future posts you write.

It’s also a good idea to know your audience, the type of people already visiting your site. Ideally you should find out information about demographics such as age, location and interests. Then you have something to work with.

You might also want to read my post about things to do on your blog when its quiet. I briefly mention SEO but there are plenty more tasks to tick off. Other important jobs you can be working on include refreshing your about me page, working on your blog media kit and improving your layout to make it more appealing to visitors.  All of this will help optimize your blog and hopefully in turn bring you better campaigns with brands.