How to Make Your Blog More SEO Friendly
1. Is your website mobile-compatible?
If you run a consumer website, you already know to make sure your
website is mobile-compatible. On the other hand, a B2B entrepreneur might think
that since very few people use a mobile device when checking out a B2B site,
it’s not important to make the pages mobile compatible. Google, on the other
hand, disagrees with that thought because of the dramatic increase in mobile
searches. By the end of 2015, we expect to see about half of Google’s paid
search clicks come from mobile devices. This is one reason why Google is taking
load time into account when the search engine ranks your site.
If you want top rankings in search engine results pages, you should
make sure your site is responsive
and fast-loading. You might not see much improvement in your search traffic in
the short term, but you most likely will see improvement in the long run. Your
probably wondering, how much does a responsive website cost? Here is an instant website
quote calculator.
2. Capitalize on implied links & brand mentions
The future of link building lies in implied links. What are those, you’re
probably asking yourself. The answer is this: an implied link is a “brand mention,” a place where your particular
company name is mentioned but not linked. Google is working on adding support
for implied links to be used to impact rankings, so you should focus on more
than just links. Get your name out there, even if you can’t get a link to your
site.
One way to get more brand mentions is to get interviewed. When
someone interviews you on their website or blog, they will at least mention you
and/or your company name. Sometimes, they’ll even provide a link. Work on
getting more people to interview you, and you can generate more backlinks or
implied links to your pages.
3. Get deep links from authority sites
If you can get authority sites to link to your internal pages, it will make
your search traffic skyrocket. For example, you can put together an amazing infographic,
blog post, report, ebook, etc. and then build relationships with authority site
owners such as Forbes, Huffington Post, and Entrepreneur. It won’t always work
and you will have to start small, but you have to start somewhere. Once you get
in the door, you can provide “QUALITY” content that links back to your site.
Example: I wrote this
article. It had over 750 shares and it generated 63 leads for my
business. You can see the links back to different pages on my website.
4. Help Google answer questions
One major evolution in Google is that the search engine giant is
trying to focus on answering people’s questions. If you do a search in the form
of a question, you will often get an answer that looks like, well, an
answer. Since Google’s Hummingbird
update, the search engine is better able to understand the meaning of words
and phrases, which enables the results page to display helpful answers to your
question together at the top of your search results.
Want to get your own content at the top of the search results that way?
Of course you do! That is why you need to answer specific questions in your
content, so your blog can be listed right at the top. For example, this article
uses “How can I increase organic traffic in 2015” as the title; this is a very
specific question. We then go on to answer that question, which helps Google
realize what the blog post is doing and better rank and categorize it.
5. Localize your pages
Maybe you’ve noticed this, and maybe
you haven’t, but Google is getting smarter about where you are located. If you
do a search for a term like “flooring company,” you will generate different
results than I do, because Google has begun showcasing local companies within
the search engine results pages.
If you want to increase web traffic, you should set up pages that
target each city you want to rank well in. Yelp does a great job of this, and
the results they’ve seen have been pretty amazing. You do want to be careful,
though, that you create unique, high quality content for each city page.
Otherwise, your pages will end up being penalized instead of showcased. The old
black hat way was to put each city name in the footer. DO NOT DO THIS. Google
sees right through this.
These tips will work to increase
blog traffic too, and will help you crest the plateau of your search engine
traffic increases and then keep going uphill. Just keep at it, and keep paying
attention to the ways in which Google is evolving, and you might never hit a
plateau again.
Did you find these tips useful? Are
you using another way to increase your organic traffic?
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