SEO For Dummies
I have been doing these SEO FOR DUMMIES posts for a while now because as you guys know over the last few months. I have really gotten into SEO stuff because I have found it incredibly beneficial for increasing the traffic and following on my blog. So I created a series of posts called SEO For Dummies to share that information with you guys.
Check out part one and part two.
To be honest, until a few months ago I didn’t know or particularly care about what SEO was or how I can use SEO to my advantage. However, since I had more free time during the lockdown I decided to do some research about it and saw just how beneficial it can be to have an SEO friendly site.
I started working on my own blog and it took me a few months to become more SEO friendly as it is quite complicated and I did almost everything on my own as it is quite expensive to get SEO work done through professionals. However, I realised that after a while I kind of got the hang of it and didn’t need that much help- yes it was very difficult and time consuming but I had a lot of free time on my hands.
Over the last two or three months I have noticed a significant increase in traffic thanks to the SEO changes I made. By significant I don’t mean a few more views, I mean like thousands of more views a month. My traffic has literally doubled.
Therefore, I decided to share some more tips with you guys today. What I realised is that although making sure your current posts are SEO friendly it’s even more important to make sure your older posts are SEO friendly as well. In fact, most of my traffic increased after I made my older posts SEO friendly and fixed all the SEO errors on my older posts. So for todays post I decided to focus on how to fix your older posts.
I also want to give you a heads up and tell you that it will take a while after you make these changes to see an increase in traffic and following as it takes a while for search engines to update information about your site. So keep calm and stay SEO friendly! It’s not instant but it’s so worth it over time.
These tips will most likely help you but if you feel like you are still not fully understanding how to make your posts and blog SEO friendly or if you just don’t have the time to make so many changes I wanted to let you know that I do offer SEO services now. I can personally both make your site as well as your blog posts more SEO friendly. For more on these services click here.
So, without any further ado, here is SEO for dummies:
What Is SEO?
“SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.”- moz.com
I think this sums up SEO and what is really well so I’m going to just leave it at that.
Why Is SEO Important?
As mentioned above SEO can help you not only increase your traffic from search engines but also help you increase your traffic to a more specific audience. It helps you get an audience that is specifically looking for sites like yours. WordPress is awesome and I love connecting with other bloggers but just having WP traffic isn’t always enough especially if you are looking to blog professionally at some point. SEO gets you this outside traffic from search engines and helps you build your blog and diversifies the audience. Here are some easy and simple ways through which you can improve your SEO:
Get A Full Site Audit
Before you do anything else I really urge you to get a full site audit. It will help you pinpoint the exact problems with your older posts if they are any. Getting a site audit saves so much time and energy and is the best way to fix your published posts.
You may be losing a significant amount of traffic simply because your older posts are not SEO friendly. And therefore search engines are leaving them out of their search results. Most of the time it’s not even huge problems and are easily fixable. Like the title tag is too long/short or there is a problem with your meta description. It literally takes a day or two to fix and increases your traffic significantly.
However, site audits can be super expensive. I know that not everyone can afford to make that kind of investment. I know it took me quite a while to save up and afford it. And the worst part was that it doesn’t really show you how to fix stuff it just shows you what’s wrong since it’s just an audit. And hiring someone to fix the problem is very expensive. So, I just had to do my research and spend like 6 months figuring everything out.
By the end I was super frustrated but also very happy with the results of my hard work. That’s why I have now started offering my own SEO services and not only are they much more affordable the best part is that I will personally show you how to make the changes. I will be there for you step by step so that you don’t have to go through what I went through. To read more about the SEO services I am offering click here.
Of course, there is no pressure to work with me. If you prefer to work with other sites please do so. Just make sure you get an audit done somehow because it is very important if you are looking to make your site more SEO friendly.
Images
Images on your posts are much more important than you think. They are a really great way to direct some search engine traffic to your posts. To use images/media on your posts to direct traffic to your posts make sure you fill out the description section on your images.
The description section allows search engines to figure out what the image is so that when someone searches for a specific image they might see your image and go to your post where the image is used. You may not realise how often this happens but it actually happens a lot.
So go back to your older posts and fill out the description section of all the images you have used in those posts.
Update Older Posts
As posts get older you need to make sure you are editing and updating them to make sure they remain relevant. You can update them in multiple ways. The first thing you want to do is read through the information and make sure it’s still accurate. Search engines tend to put a lot of importance on the quality of the information you are providing.
Next, you can check what keywords are currently best for the topics on the posts and update your post and tags accordingly. Keywords tend to change over time and different things become more/less popular over time. What is popular now may not have been a few years or even a few months ago.
I would also really recommend updating links you have used in your posts especially external links. This is because over time some links change, some sites shut down so the link are no longer available etc. This may leave your posts with broken links that don’t work which is a big red flag for search engines. Update your links and make sure you get rid of the ones that no longer work.
Add Relevant Backlinks
Over time you will obviously have published more posts. And many of them may be dealing with the same or similar topics. You can go back to older posts dealing with the same topics and add relevant backlinks linking to new posts that talk about similar or the same topic and the older post.
Adding backlinks is not only great for your SEO but also for increasing traffic in general as readers who read one post on that topic tend to often be interested in reading more posts on that topic or on similar topics.
Conclusion For SEO For Dummies
I hope you found this post helpful. And if you are looking to make your site more SEO friendly I hope this helped you see the importance of making not only future posts more SEO friendly but older ones as well.
I also wanted to let you guys know that I am having problems with my WordPress account at the moment. It’s not letting me follow anyone or like any posts. And of course as usual it is probably going to take forever to fix. Sorry if I am not able to be active on your blog but I literally can’t. I will be active again as soon as the problems are fixed. Thanks for understanding!
Thoughts On SEO For Dummies
Are you like me and have a hard time understanding SEO? What is something you have learnt about SEO that you have found beneficial? Did you know about the tips I mentioned above and do you use any of them? If so do you find them effective? Would you like to see more similar posts with easy/simple tips and tricks about SEO? As always I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. And if you don’t have any thoughts about SEO feel free to just say hi!
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