Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Your Writer Blog
You’ve decided to start a blog. You’ve spent hours coming up with a clever title and tagline, about the layout and color scheme, getting the highest resolution banner photos and videos your smartphone can provide, and, of course, crafting a short, sweet, and all-encompassing bio. You even have your first handful of posts queued up and scheduled. But have you taken the time to make sure you’re incorporating search engine optimization (SEO) strategies on your site?
Dive into digital marketing for any length of time and SEO is bound to come up. In a nutshell, SEO is the method used to increase search engine results. Why does this matter? Well, while you can drive traffic to your website through things like social media or ads, most online traffic is driven by organic searches on Google, Bing, etc. The better your SEO and the more traffic your site gets, the higher you’ll rank, which ultimately means it helps drive even more traffic to your website.
But while SEO can make a big difference, the changes and strategies to implement are actually pretty straightforward—at least if your goal is to keep it simple. A large parts of building SEO is taking the time to consistently do the legwork, track the data, and make tweaks according to the stats you’re collecting over time.
Here are a few basics to help you get started.
Keywords. When you type a word or phrase into Google you’ll get a number of results. The words you typed in the produced results are called “keywords.” Which keywords should you choose? It depends on your goals for the site, the content being created, and the audience you’re aiming to drive to your site.
Backlinks. Backlinks are exactly what they sound like: They’re links that bring people to your website from other websites. Backlinks are incredibly powerful for SEO tools because Google views them as endorsements. When someone backlinks to your site they’re not only driving traffic to you, they’re also telling Google, “Hey this site is legit, you should recommend it more!”
Crawlability. Every search engine has a crawler, an index, and an algorithm. Think of a crawler like a basset hound. It follows the links like a trail and when Google finds your site, it reads it and saves it in its index—I like to think of it as a Rolodex. Once Google knows that you’re part of the worldwide web, when someone searches for a keyword, it includes you in its algorithm. But if Google can’t crawl your site, you won’t be indexed and you won’t be able to rise through the algorithm’s search engine ranks.
Tracking. All this work is for nothing if you don’t track and collect data. Yes, I understand, we’re wordsmiths and we don’t typically get along with numbers. But for the sake of honing your SEO and growing your audience, I highly recommend you take the plunge. While the strategies mentioned above can help you get started, what strategy works best is going to vary from writer to writer and site to site. The only way to know if what you’re doing is working is to track how many people are visiting your site and their behavior once they click into your site. Many website builders like WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace have built-in analytics to help you track how often people are visiting your site, what they’re clicking on, where traffic is coming from, and more. But I’d also recommend setting up a Google Analytics account to help ensure that your website is optimized for crawlability.
While these four aspects of SEO can help you get started, there is a lot more to learn, depending on your specific short- and long-term needs and goals.
Also, it’s important to note that SEO takes time to build. Think of SEO like a stock: You need to consistently feed it over time to help it grow. As you build it and traffic flow increases, the value of the fund will increase. So if you don’t see a significant spike in traffic right away, don’t panic and keep working at it.
To learn more about SEO and how to effectively implement strategies that meet your needs and goals, here are two resources that helped me get started:
Moz’s comprehensive Beginner’s Guide to SEO
Tools for monitoring SEO (besides Google Analytics)
