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SEO basics for Bloggers

12 Jul

BLOGGING & SEO WHAT’S THE GO?

HOW TO MAKE YOUR BLOG SEO FRIENDLY

Blogger Guide to SEO friendly ContentWHAT IS SEO & WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?

SEO is the abbreviation for Search Engine Optimisation. SEO affects your websites and it’s corresponding pages visibility in search engines like Google.com. The better your webpages SEO the higher it ranks in search engines and the more likely it is to appear in the first few pages of a search and be clicked. This means more traffic to your blog! As a Blogger you want your content to be found, read and shared and having a blog with SEO friendly content that drives traffic from search engines is the key. Now that you understand what SEO is and why it’s important, it’s time to get started on making your blog and posts SEO friendly using these basic SEO techniques.

** MAKING YOUR BLOG SEO FRIENDLY **

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* LINK BACKS

If you want to get your blog or webpage listed in search engines as soon as possible (beat the crawlers) getting your URL listed on a high ranking webpage is the key. If such webpage is using some of the same keywords as you do/intend to it’s a bonus! So if you have a friend with a high ranking website or blog ask for a link. You can also purchase ad space on certain websites or blogs or offer free link exchange.

* HEADER TAGS

 Header tags look like the following: <h1> <h2> <h3>. When adding a title or subtitle use your header tags rather than a picture. If you include the first three H-Tags ( H1, H2 and H3) in your post you’re doing well. If they happen to contain your keyword/s that’s excellent. I try an include at least a descriptive <h1> tag within each of my posts.

* KEYWORDS

Keywords are a particular word or phrase that describes the contents of a web page/blog post. The word/s in which people use to search for particular content in a search engine. With this post for example, I may choose to you use a keyword or keyword phrase like the following: “Blogging and SEO” “SEO for Bloggers” or just “SEO”. It’s important to determine what keyword or keyword phrase you want to include within your posts/web content before you begin writing. Be aware that more popular/simpler keywords or keyword phrases (like SEO) are more commonly used and harder to get indexed in a position where they would be found. Because of this it’s best to choose something less popular or direct like “SEO Basics for Bloggers” and focus on getting your content indexed using that keyword. Once you have determined your chosen keyword/s or phrase concentrate on including it within your content. Try not to go overboard and use your keyword/s in every second sentence. You want your keywords to flow organically. Plus people want to read your content not a bunch of keywords ( or H-tags for that matter). Position of your keywords is also important. It’s best to try and include your keyword/s within the first sentence of your first paragraph and the last sentence of your final paragraph. You can also scatter them through out your content and include them within image titles and captions (see next step).

* BE DESCRIPTIVE

Use descriptive titles, subtitles, photo captions, photo titles, post categories, URLS and post tags that include your keyword/s or phrases. Don’t upload a photo or image with a title something along the lines of “zxcqjhdudi”. Add a descriptive title that either describes the image or the post in which it is featured. This also a great habit to get into especially if you want people to share imagery from your webpage to sites Pinterest or WeheartIt. An image titled ”zxcqjhdudi” doesn’t look all that professional and as most people don’t bother to manually change this, when the image is later found its’ context unknown and less likely to click on.

* LIMIT IMAGES

Use html to alter text, add borders, line breaks etc. instead of including an image. For example if you want to include a coloured title, do so using html not by inserting an image created in Photoshop or Illustrator. Limiting the amount of images will also make your pages load quicker. Research has shown that if a website takes more than 4 seconds to load over 1/3 of people will not continue to wait. You don’t want that!

* LINK CONTENT

Add links to other content or  pages within your current posts. You can do this by referring to a past post in text, inserting a related posts widget or a little footer note like “If you enjoyed this article you may like link, link or link.”

* ENCOURAGE SHARING

 You can easily do this by including Social Media sharing buttons within each post. Most themes already include these, but if yours doesn’t to you can install a Plugin (25 examples) or manually add each button/link in html. My favourite Free Link Builders for Pinterest (official) and Twitter, Facebook and Google+. 
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These are just the very basics of creating a SEO friendly blog and content that will hopefully have you on the way to a creating regularly indexed and clicked search engine content. If you have any questions or tutorial requests feel free to comment below. I’d love to answer your questions and hear your post suggestions.
Signnn

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Blogger Tips

19 Apr

HOW TO INCREASE BLOG TRAFFIC

Food Blogger Edition

You have spent hours in the kitchen creating something fabulous. Another half an hour or so serving it up and making the plate look like something out of a magazine. Now you meticulously photograph your creation, edit such photos and upload them along with your delicious recipe to your blog. You’re proud. Damn proud. You wait for the traffic to come pouring in. After all who wouldn’t want to be left drooling at their computer screen at what you have made? You get a few comments from your regular readers but no drastic spike in traffic, comments or “likes”. What’s a Blogger to do to get noticed? Well I have the answer for you and it is self promotion! I am not saying go spam every piece of social media you have access to but be smart and utilise such devices. Here a few of my go-to methods of drawing attention to my recipe posts;

1. Pinterest: Okay so this one isn’t actually something new or unique but if you’re a food blogger or a blogger that posts about food you should be on Pinterest and pinning your photographs. To be honest unless you have a heap of established followers pinning to your own boards isn’t going to draw in a lot of traffic. Yes you may get lucky and have some Pinterest Bigwig repin one of your recipe for her/his thousands of followers to see but with Pinterest housing millions of pins your chances are slim. My solution; Community Boards. Community boards often have a huge following, some in the hundreds of thousands. Joining is pretty easy and often just requires a quick email to the creator or commenting on a pin with your request. Finding such boards is the main issue with this however, once you find a few and join the invites will come rolling in from other board creators and users (or so I have found). To get you started you can view a few here on my profile  (marked with a little 3 crowd icon) or request to join my own community board “I actually Made this!“. A side note: Some board creators are super strict and will delete you from pinning to their board/s if they believe you are spamming. To ensure this doesn’t happen don’t overdo the pinning and be sure to follow any board rules or guidelines.

Vanilla Glazed Doughnut

2. Online Food/Recipe Galleries:  These websites are somewhat similar to Pinterest except you need to manually submit your recipes and images to be reviewed for submittal. If your recipe and image makes the cut your photograph will be added to the websites recipe database where readers can search for it via category or keyword. I find that with majority of these websites in order for your submission to be accepted you need an exceptionally good photograph. I personally have about a 50-50 success rate when it comes to these websites and often have to crop or re-edit some submissions for them to be accepted. Although this seems like a lot of effort once accepted you will receive significant traffic to your blog that keeps on coming month’s after your submission has been published. Below are a few Recipe Galleries that I submit to (In order of what I find drives the most traffic)

FoodGawker, TasteSpotting, Tasteologie, Foodvee and Serious Eats. I am yet to try these fully but here are some similar websites which may be worth a shot: Food and Fizz, Food Epix, Dessert Stalking and Bakeolicious.

3. Food Blogger Communities: Food Blogger Communities are a great way to connect with fellow bloggers, share links, ideas and tweets. My faves are Food Bloggers Australia and Serious Eats, but I am sure there are hundreds or more specific to your location and recipes. If you become an active member you may have your recipe featured on the websites homepage, ultimately drawing in a lot of new traffic and hopefully regular readers.

raspberry cookies

4. Facebook Related Groups: Joining Facebook recipe, food or food blogging groups is a great way of gaining exposure for your blog and make new friends. Friend’s who are often nice enough to exchange Tweets, Facebook shares and Blog Buttons, which are all great ways to expand your audience and increase page views. Most communities allow you to post links to your most recent posts, which is always helpful in increasing traffic.

5. Let your readers spread the word:  My final tip is to utilise social media sharing buttons. So be sure to include them within each of your posts. This will encourage your readers to share your recipes with their friends and followers. Most blog platforms have these already built in so you may not have to worry about manually adding them, if not not it’s well worth the extra time it takes to include them.

I hope you have found these useful. If you have any of your own tips feel free to share them below. Becky xo

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