Blogging for Beginners

I have been blogging for over 10 years. Now by no means am I an expert on how to have a successful blog, but I know a couple of tips and tricks to make blogging for beginners, a little easier.

When I started blogging over a decade ago, the tips to improve traffic to your blog included: Writing a blog post daily, reading thousands of blog posts and commenting on at least half of these posts.

It was a must, a truly tried and tested recipe to gain followers. There is merit, even to today! Reading and commenting on blogger content helps you to become a part of a blogging community. A place where fellow bloggers become good friends.

Later on, sharing your posts through social media became a must. Joining a blogging community, like a Facebook Group for bloggers was (and is) still huge.

Now I know where my limitations are in terms of blogging. I know my blog isn’t top priority, or if I am being blatantly honest on my top 10 list of priorities and I am okay with that. It doesn’t mean I’m going to stop blogging, but it does mean, that I cannot expect my blog to be as successful as bloggers who dedicate hours every day, to write amazing content, post beautiful images and take the needed time to share their content in social media.

There are plenty of myths out there when it comes to blogging. Some of the things that were must have’s five years ago, is total hogwash today. Long story short – read the posts, consider the implications (Is it sustainable for me?) and choose what’s important to you!

To me in this season of life, it just isn’t sustainable do all of the above. So here’s what I am focusing on, as a blogger, at the moment!

3 Simple things to improve your blog SEO | Blogging for Beginners

SEO or Search Engine Optimization

Most of the traffic to this little site comes from organic searches. In other words, what people are Googling.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. (Source) In layman’s terms, it has to do with where your website rank when it comes to searching something specific in Google.

The goal ultimately is to rank on the very first page of every search.

1.) Yoast SEO

If you want to master SEO on your blog, install the Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin.

The plugin guides you to meet every requirement in order to optimize your blog posts in order to rank well in the search engines. It uses the colours, red (bad), orange (okay) and green (great) to measure the various items needed to optimize your SEO.

Not only does the plugin highlight what you would need to change in your post in order to improve your SEO, but it also provides links to articles that explains what they mean with the instruction!

In a nutshell, Yoast makes it really easy to write blog posts with excellent SEO.

Yoasts helps you to improve your SEO while analysing the readability of your content. Cause let’s face it, you really don’t want your blog to be compared with a self-help book that puts people to sleep!

Download the Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin.

Blogging for Beginner Tip

It is well worth it to review the SEO of past posts. Yoast makes it so easy to tweak published posts in order for these posts to rank higher!

2.) Google Keyword Planner

Once I mastered how to optimised my blog posts for SEO, I realised the importance of choosing the right keyword.

Initially, my keywords were really one-word keywords like blog; ADHD or chess.

The great thing about these words are that they score really high when it comes to the average number of searches per month. The sad thing is that the competition for these keywords is a great deal more. In other words, the chances of your page ranking on the first page of Google’s results become a whole lot less likely.

My advice | Pay attention to your own Google searches

Consider your own google searches. What are you more likely to google? Blog or blog basics? How to start a blog? How to be a successful blogger?

When choosing your keyword, you need to consider what people are googling.

The more specific the keyword, the greater the chance that people who land on the page will value and engage with what you have written. (If the content is amazing of course!)

Google Ads allows you to plan and compare keywords.

Blogging for Beginner Tip

Before writing a blog post, think of the keywords you want to use. Head over to Keyword Planner and insert the words or phrases. Be sure to check which word combinations or phrases you should use when writing your blog post.

3.) Co-Scheduler Headline Analyzer

Once I had mastered how to write SEO optimized blog posts, with the right keywords, I realised it was time to start writing enticing headlines. Co-Scheduler’s Headline Analyser is brilliant for analysing headlines, to ensure the correct word balance is used when writing blog posts.

Start by inserting the headline and select ‘analyze now’. As you can see from the above screenprint – my first headline for this post – “Better SEO for beginner bloggers” – didn’t rank very well. In fact, I score a mere 56 post! My second attempt at writing a headline was much better.

Keep tweaking the headline, until you score 70 or more points.

Blogging for Beginners

Blogging should be fun and sustainable in your lifestyle. There’s no need to pressurize yourself to do everything in one go. Take the time to learn one new essential skill – like SEO – at a time and master it. Before you know it, you will be sharing your very own tips and tricks.