Google Is Your Friend,Just That You Are Not Doing The Right Things

From the kind of questions I have to deal with these days, I want to believe that many new bloggers perceive SEO as something too technical, and can only be done by experts. No! It's just about optimizing your web pages for search engines. For you to get a constant flow of organic traffic, you have to become good friends with Google and other search engines.

Very quickly, I'll highlight the basic elements of SEO you need to implement on every single page on your site. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is categorically divided into two: On-page and Off-page SEO, respectively.

The on-page deals with whatever that's present on your site. The off-page deals with what goes beyond your site. I'll expantiate.

For On-page SEO, there's are what you need to do on every page to optimize your rankings. But, before I do, there's something more important, and that thing is called KEYWORDS. The whole on-page SEO strategy for a particular page depends on the target Keywords. And as such, you need to carry out extensive keywords research, before you start writing a page.

If you check through my previous posts here, you'll see a post where I described how to get a premium Moz subscription for free. Moz tools will help you conduct Keywords analysis. You can also use it to monitor the top sites in your niche and the keywords they're ranking for. Well, a discussion for another time.

Back to the main topic, here are the basic elements of on-page SEO:

1. Target Keywords. It's better to target long-tail keywords with low KD (Keyword difficulty). As a new site, it helps to rank faster.

2. Keywords Density: Your keywords must appear at least 5 times in the body of your blog post. Anything beyond five times leads to keyword stuffing. It will hurt your SEO growth. More so, make sure you place your keywords in the introductory paragraph on every blog post.

3. Meta Description: A short description of about 150 characters is necessary. For Wordpress users, there are plugins that allows you to input keywords, and meta description. For blogspot users; go to your blogger dashboard, activate the "Meta Description" in the settings menu. Then, you have to upload your blog post through the browser instead of the mobile app to utilize the Search description function.

4. Internal Links: Within the body of your blog post, put links to other related posts on your blog. It helps search engines to crawl your site faster.

5. External Links: You also need to put links to external authority sites in your niche. It's not compulsory, but it helps in SEO too.

6. Image Alt Attributes: For this element, insert your target Keywords for a page into every image in that blog post.

7. Text/Content Length: Your blog post must have a minimum of 300 words to be considered valuable by search engines.

8. Title Tag: The target Keyword must appear in the title of the blog post. If my target keyword is "five love languages," my blog title should be like "What You Need To Know About The Five Love Languages." It's even advisable to put the Keywords at the beginning of the title.

9. Slug/Permalink: Your keyword must appear in the URL address of the blog page. The slug/permalink is the last section of your URL. If your site is yourdomain.com, your page url must look like yourdomain.com/2021/03/know-the-five-love-languages

Looking at the URL above, the Keyword is present in the slug. Please, avoid using underscores in your slug. Blospot users should modify their permalink through a web browser before publishing their post. Your permalink can't be edited once you publish the post.

11. Site Speed/Navigation: Ensure your site is not slow. Also, make sure your blog design is appealing to your visitors. User experience is one of the factors Google use to rank pages. Avoid the use of excessive scripts or plugins in your site.

And that's all for On-page SEO. Off-page SEO is just about building your Domain Authority and a healthy backlinks profile. The more you get quality backlinks, the more your DA/PA (Page Authority) increases.

The most paramout thing is the On-page aspect. Don't forget this; in the blogging and SEO, CONTENT is King. If you do all the things above, and your blog posts aren't valuable, original and unique, sorry for yourself! You're merely wasting your time.

On a final note, SEO takes time before you start seeing results. It may take between 2-6 months before you get desired results, depending on your DA. Two days ago, I wrote a blog post for a target keyword. The post got indexed yesterday morning, and at the moment, it's already ranking #1 for the exact keyword, despite the fact that there are other old pages on the same topic. That's what SEO can do, if you do it the right way. 

What matters most is your consistency. Just keep doing these for every page you publish. In due time, Google will become your best friend.

Wish you all a nice weekend, and the best of luck with Google! 😊