SEO That Works For Bloggers And Small Businesses

So you have a beautiful new website, great job! But now it’s time for the hard work to really begin and focus on SEO that works. It’s all well and good having a snazzy new site or blog, but unless you have a solid plan for how you are going to get that site ranking on search engines then it’s just a big ol’ waste of money.

So how can you get Google and other search engines to notice your website? Simple, it’s time to get your Search Engine Optimization game on. In this blog post, I’m going to talk you through some things you can do to get your website to the first page of Google, and I’m not talking black hat SEO here, no I’m all about the ethical search engine optimization.

Things to know about SEO that works

Ok, so first things first, if you don’t know your H2 from your Keyword, then before we go any further take a read of this blog post on SEO terminology and download the SEO cheat sheet so you can understand all of the SEO speak that is coming your way and consider using some of these great SEO tools.

My top SEO tips for bloggers and small businesses

This post is for both bloggers and small business owners, because quite frankly if you have a website you are missing a trick if you don’t have a blog. One word, well 2, content marketing. If your website doesn’t have a blog, you need one! With at least 5 blog posts that have at least 1000 words. If you are a small business and you aren’t sure what to write about it’s pretty simple really.

You need to write things that your potential clients are searching for. So if you are an online life coach think about some problems that your potential clients might be searching for.

Write things that people are searching for

It really is that simple, think about how people ask google for things and keep that in mind when you are writing anything to go on your website.

For example:

Instead of writing – if you are looking for a yoga class check our schedule here.

Write – if you are looking for a yoga class in Playa del Carmen class check our schedule here.

The keyword here is yoga class in Playa del Carmen

A quick and easy way of improving your SEO is to take some time to just read back through old blog posts and see where you can add in those keywords. Even if you have no idea about keyword research this is a really easy place to start.

Key Word Research

Now it’s time to do some Key Word Research (KWR) to make sure you are hitting all of their pain points. You can learn to do this yourself, Digital Nomad Wannabe is a great resource for learning KWR!

A great place to start when learning SEO is by taking one of the Digital Nomad Wannabe 7 day free SEO challenges. And this is my faviourite tool for finding the best keywords. You can take 20% off using my code KSDISC.

Write the best content

One sure-fire way of making sure that you get to the top of Google is to make sure that your content is the best there is.

Seriously, there is nothing search engines love more than solid content.

So make sure that when someone clicks on your content they get everything that they need so they don’t have to return to Google and search again. That’s a big trigger to google that your content isn’t all that.

Keep an eye on trending topics

In general, it is going to take any new content 3-6 months to rank on Google. In the first months, you may see your site rising and falling dramatically. One day you are number 12, the next you are 87. This is totally normal and just Google testing out the best place for your website to go.

If you don’t want to wait there is one way you can skip this long wait, writing fresh new content about trending topics that no one else has written yet.

For example, I recently wrote a blog post on a new blog that I’d only launched a few days before, about an on-trend topic that no one else had written about. It went right in at number 1 and stayed there. In the first 3 days, we had over 5000 hits. Now the downside is that that traffic will slow down once the topic isn’t so newsworthy. But it’s still a great way to get some traffic to your site.

Link building for authority

I’m going to try and break this down as simply as I possibly can without going too much into the tech speak.

Every website has an authority score. Your website authority is a demonstration of how much Google likes you. Now there is a bit more to it than that, but this is all you really need to know right now. A good way of checking your website’s authority is by checking your DA score on MOZ. 1 is the lowest and 100 is the highest.

If you want a quick way of building your website’s authority then you need to start doing some link building to get some ‘dofollow’. Basically asking other websites to link back to your website from their website. There are many ways of doing this from guest posts on other sites to commenting on other blogs. To pay for ‘dofollow’ backlinks from other sites to yours is against Google’s terms and conditions. Paid links must be marked as either ‘nofollow’ or’ sponsored’. you have been warned.

If you want to do some link building yourself then I highly recommend this free 7-day challenge. I’ve done it several times when I needed to give various blog posts a boost.

Do some basic technical SEO on your site

There are several ways that you can help your sites SEO and I have listed them below.

Internal linking – Each of your blog posts or pages needs to have at least 2 other blog posts or pages linking to it. Posts or pages that don’t have any internal links are known as orphaned and this will negatively impact your SEO. If you have the Yoast plugin installed you will be able to easily see the posts and pages that are orphaned. So just go through and make sure everything is linked up.

External linking – As a rule, each post or page should have 2 external authority links in it. An authority link is basically a link to another external website that is an authority of the subject matter you are writing about. This could be an online newspaper or Wikipedia etc.

Proper categorization – When I first started my blog I had a lot of categories and I filed each blog post into as many of them as I could. But now I know better, this really just confuses Google. So really streamline your categories and only choose one per post, or two if you really, really need it.

Too many tags – If you are using tags on your blog posts then please just go easy on them. You don’t need more than 5 or 6 as it will just confuse google. I tent to just use 3-4 usually.

URL structure – Pay attention to your URL structure.

www.clairesitchyfeet.com/post12356 is not going to get you and SEO juice from Google however www.clairesitchyfeet.com/seo-tools is. Plus it just looks better. So be sure to try and add in a keyword to your URL if you can.

ALT tags – Each of your images needs to have an ALT tag. The function of an ALT tag is to describe the image for visually impaired users. Google also reads this text, as it can’t read images. So be sure to describe your images and add in a keyword for good measure.

Yoast – This is a WordPress plugin that was an absolute gamechanger for me in learning SEO. Install it and work through their training videos. It will give you access to add in a focus keyword, SEO title, and Meta Description. It will also give you tips on readability which will help make sure your writing is up to scratch.

One thing I would say though is that don’t pay too much attention to the advice it will give you about your main keyword. It will tell you you need to add it in way more than you actually do, just 2-3 times towards the top, and in your SEO title and meta description is fine.

Final thoughts on SEO for bloggers

Not sure where to start? If you need some extra help with your SEO then get in touch. I love working with bloggers and small businesses to improve your SEO. I can run off some SEO reports do a site audit, then it’s up to you. You can fix the issues yourself. Or I can fix them for you. Just fill out the contact form and I’ll be in touch soon.