How To Increase Blog Traffic - 10 SEO Tips

How To Increase Blog Traffic

10 SEO Tips For More Traffic On Your Blog

As a blogger, you naturally need a lot of website visitors and other people who read your articles. This is especially important if you are a full-time blogger because you also want to get income from it. The larger your audience, the more companies will be interested in advertising on your blog. But how does one increase brand awareness and make sure that people find your blog? Very simple, with SEO (Search Engine Optimization). It sounds complicated and confusing, we understand that.

That is why we give you 10 tip here on how you can increase the traffic to your blogs yourself.

Increase Blog Traffic

1. Google Analytics and Search Console

Let's start with the basics; a Google Analytics and Search Console account. Don't have an account yet? Then create this quickly. With this, you ensure that Google can actually find your blog. And being visible in Google search results is, of course, a must! Also not unimportant, with these tools you get insight into your website (pages), visitors and your position in the search results. Create an account here: 

•  Google Analytics
•  Search Console

2. SEO plugin

You probably have already got a couple of plugins installed on your website. Is one already focused on SEO optimizations? This is important to have, especially as a blogger. Use a plugin with which you'll view, edit and manage the SEO on every page. We use Yoast for this. This plugin is sort of common and is strongly offered by many bloggers.

With Yoast, you've got an on-page content analysis, XML sitemap and other very useful functions. Also nice, it's a free plugin in WordPress and very easy.

3. Sitemaps 

A well-organized sitemap is a definitive must for SEO! You have two variants, namely an HTML sitemap and an XML sitemap.

HTML sitemap is an extra page and gives a clear overview of your website visitors about all pages on your website.

An XML sitemap is a file with pages and messages. This tells the search engines which pages they can see.

A well-organized sitemap is extremely important because search engines like Google read this file.

4. Redirect all 404s

Everyone sometimes comes across a 404 error page on an internet site. A robot automatically places this on a page once they encounter a link that not works.

It is important to regularly check whether you've got such pages because you obviously don't want error pages. Besides, it also works very badly for your SEO. With for example MoZ, screaming frog and another plugin, such as Redirection, you can easily solve this yourself.

First, scan your website with MOZ, screaming frog. Also, to duplicate content, this tool gives you insight into which pages have a 404. Then with Redirection, you can redirect the page to a page that is active and comparable.

5. Duplicated content

Now that you have an SEO plugin and an organized sitemap, it's time to look at the content. First of all, it's important to get rid of duplicated content. Robots that crawl your website get confused when there is duplicate content. This applies to both the texts and the meta description. Neither can be double.

Useful tools that you can use for this:

• MoZ: This program makes an extensive scan of your website and finds, among other things, double (page) titles and meta descriptions.

• Site liner: An online tool that checks whether there is duplicate content within your website. It shows exactly which pages the duplicated content is on.

• SmallSeoTools: This online tool checks whether there's duplicate content with other websites. Try to make your text as unique as possible and avoid having duplicated content with perhaps your competitors.

6. Increase the website speed

Now that the duplicate content and the 404 error pages have been removed, it's time to increase the speed. But how and why? The speed of your website affects your entire SEO. You will be punished by Google albeit your website is just too slow. A useful gizmo to see this is often Google PageSpeed Insight. It controls the speed of your blog for both desktop and mobile.

7. Linkbuilding time

The ultimate goal for every blogger or company is to be on page 1 of Google. Preferably at the very top of place 1. Important for this is having a blog with high authority. The more high-quality links that link to your blog, the higher your authority will be. And not to mention, the amount of links to your blog is one of the biggest influences for SEO.

Pay attention! It is important not to exchange a link with any company. Try to find companies that have already got high authority.

There are different ways to link building:

• Write a guest post for other blogs or websites (don't forget to include a link to your own blog);

• Ask other blogs or websites if they want to link to your blog (for a fee or with a re-link).

8. Alt texts

Perhaps, as a blogger, you already spend tons of your time searching and taking the proper photos and pictures for your article. This is good because images can give your SEO an additional boost. It is not only the correct resolution, size, and placement that is important. The alt texts also need some attention. They give you an extra place to process an important keyword. Google not only views texts on a website but also the alt texts of your images. So don't forget to use this SEO boost!

9. Do not publish to publish

As a blogger, you are constantly busy with writing and publishing articles. It is important to require under consideration whether the content of your articles is usable for the reader. Try to take into consideration that what you publish is usable for the reader.

10. A keyword analysis

We will now start researching the keywords for your article. To make it easier, we have divided it into two points.

1) How do you do a keyword analysis?

There are several ways to do keyword analysis. The Google search bar is a free and easy way. Have you noticed that when you type something in the search bar your question or term often appears below it? These are suggestions from Google and the most popular search terms that people search for. A disadvantage of this method is that it gives you no further information, like the search volume.

Another way to research keywords is through a web service. Many companies offer tools and programs to help you with this. Do you have a Google Adwords account? Then have a look at their Keyword planner. It gives you an inventory of keywords and suggestions, but also what the search volume per month is. Other programs that will help are SEMRush and Ahrefs.

Do not focus on one specific keyword, this does not work positively for your article and can quickly be seen as about optimization. Instead, it is good to include variations of the most important keyword in your article. Another option is to process your keyword in a long tail. A longtail keyword consists of 3 to 4 words and is usually less competitive.

2) Where do you place the keyword?

Now that you simply have chosen a keyword for your article, it's important that you simply use it correctly. For SEO, it is important to put your keyword at least in the following places:

• In the title of your article. The earlier in an H1, the better.
• In the URL. domain.com/keyword