Are you a blogger? Stop Writing. Now!

If you are a blogger, stop writing. Now. And shhhhh…listen.   You’re about to learn five SEO tips for bloggers that will rock your blog.

I am very excited to have finally managed to pin my dear friend and sister Vanita Cyril here today for a guest post. She kicks ass as THE authority on SEO + WordPress for Bloggers and Entrepreneurs and helps bloggers make their blog rock. And? She always, always over-delivers.

You know what’s funny? We chat all day long, on and off. Some days we just say “hi” and then comfortably work together in silence – with the happy feeling that we can crib/gossip/share info/laugh/joke any time we want.

So I was on her back – bugging her to share some SEO tips for bloggers here. Maybe it is not rocket science, but admit it – we would all rather just write and be done with it, no? Okay, I speak for myself.

But don’t  you wish there was a short sweet to-do list you could do to give your post / blog the best chances of being found online?  And that’s exactly what Vanita came up with.

There’s one quote that instantly comes to mind when I think of Vanita. It is this: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” She’s the sort who teaches you to fish, generously.  As a student of her Google Luv ecourse, I know that first-hand.

Welcome, Vanita! Squishy hugs! Take it away!

 Cartoon credit Edouard Blais

5 solid SEO tips for bloggers

by

Vanita Cyril

If you, my blogging buddy, have a need to increase your search engine traffic, then you need to stop writing, right now. No worries, I will share with you why, but first…

If on the other hand, you couldn’t care a flying flamingo about Google and increasing your blog traffic, I suggest this wonderful post from my dear sis Vidya on the miracles of friendship.

Now, let’s get back to why you need to stop writing to feed your Google traffic fetish.

Believe it or not Google loves bloggers.

If it weren’t for bloggers, I’m not sure how Google would reach it’s goals of providing content that’s as information packed as Life Hacker, yet as entertaining as Oprah and as unique as the Mona Lisa – I know tall order – all at lightning speed.

Now, some of you may be thinking, I’ve got great content, why isn’t Google loving my blog?

Pandas people, pandas.

The Panda was designed to weed out low quality sites. Wait, I’m not saying your site is low quality.

But once upon a time, our high quality posts could rank on page one of the Search Engine results even if we had some posts that weren’t content rich.

Now? Google looks at your whole site and you know what they say about one bad apple…

But never fear my blogging buddy! It’s fixable.

How do you know what needs fixing? Check out the list below to learn if you need to stop writing [for now] and start fixing.

Content Length

Have any posts with less than 750 words? Then you’ll want to open that post using Google Chrome with the SEOQuake extension installed and take a look at your html to text ratio. Aim for at least 20% text. If your percentage is rated lower, your options are increasing the length of your post or removing anything from the post, sidebar or your footer that’s adding html coding to the page. Think widgets and ad codes.

Content Quality

How is your post better than the other posts ranking for the same keywords in the search engine results? Take a look at your competition, what are they doing to rank on page one? Can you improve your post to be better? Of course you can!

Unique Content

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel to be unique. Your blogging voice and point of view alone makes you unique. For that extra oomph, add pictures and your own YouTube videos or SlideShares. Spruce up those posts that fall flat. Not sure which posts? Dive into your Google Analytics account and from the sidebar on the left, choose Content > Site Content > Landing Pages and improve those links that have a bounce rate of over 80%.

Irrelevant SEO

I know SEO can be a bore, but I do push people to search engine optimize their posts. The little things you do for your post from adding the keyword phrase to your first paragraph to filling out the meta fields in the seo plugin area on the post page, these things assist Google in knowing what your post is all about. If you are following these practices and they’re not helping, then I need to ask, are you optimizing your posts incorrectly? Yes? Time to fix those posts, bud.

Bounce Rate

Let’s say each and everyone of your posts are dynamic and optimized for search engines, but you’re still not ranking in the search engine results. Maybe it’s not your post. Maybe it’s your whole blog.

Visitors from the search engine land on your blog to learn of whatever they searched for and then they leave. This hurts your bounce rate and signals to Google that you may not deserve to rank, no matter how good you post is.

No worries! All is certainly not lost. We just need to keep your visitors longer on your blog. I love infographics, though I’m not a pro at compiling info to create one. However, Visual.ly will inspire you and allow you to make your own infographics for free. Add one to a page on your blog and add a screenshot of it in your post that links to the infographic page. When your visitor follows the link from your post to the infographic, it signals to Google that the visitor is cruising around your blog and that helps your bounce rate. For more ideas, I have a post for you on making your blog sticky.

And there you have it friends, 5 reasons to stop writing and start fixing.

Thanks for reading and thank you my sis Vidya for inviting me to share my seo geekiness.

Thank you, Vanita!

Follow Vanita on Twitter and “Like” her page on Facebook – TheStrategicMama

Hire Vanita to:

• Move your blog
• Design Your WordPress Blog
• Rock your blog
• Teach you to make Google love your blog

I must confess I did not care about bounce rate or about attempting to learn about SEO for bloggers.  The truth is, it feels great to have the search engines choose your blog when someone searches for something online. So it makes sense to be relevant and unique so that your visitor can hang around your blog.

So now, tell me –  Do you think Vanita’s basic SEO tips for bloggers will help you?

Have a question about these tips? Please Ask!