May 23, 2017 THE SIMPLE THREE-STEP GUIDE TO IMPROVING YOUR SEO RANK

As a blogger, you must’ve heard about SEO optimization like a million times. Optimizing your site for search engines is essential and this is no news, but how to do that should not be complicated. There are a few simple steps you can take to improve your SEO.

What you should keep in mind is that SEO is not a one-time project. It’s an ongoing process. Also, it takes time after implementing the changes to see results, so the secret is to be patient and spend some time consistently every week to optimize your blog because the marketing

reach potential is definitely worth it.

Here are simple 3 steps to improve your SEO ranking:

1) Keyword Research:

Keyword research is the first step to SEO. Knowing what people are typing on search engines, what’s the frequency of each keyword, how relevant they are to your business and what your competitors are implementing can drastically help you optimize your blog. For instance, if you’re a fashion blogger and you want to use fashion as a keyword, you have to be aware that the search volume of fashion is very high and people type in fashion for many different reasons such as kid’s fashion, fashion trends, etc. Also, the competition for this keyword is very high and it might not even be very related to your specific niche. However, using the keyword, ethical fashion blogger and stylist which is not typed in that much, is extremely relevant and not competitive. Here are some tips to follow:

1. Put yourself in the shoes of your readers

2. Ask yourself what is it that you offer

3. Use long-tail keywords than with lesser search volumes that are highly related to your blog

4. Use Google’s Keyword Planner for brainstorming relevant keywords

2) Content Creation

The content on your site not only must be optimized based on your keyword research but also optimized based on its structure to allow visitors easily navigate your site without getting confused. It is important that the structure on your site is organized and helps the visitors easily and intuitively find their way around your content. A great way you can find this out is to check your heat maps on your Google Analytics, or simply share your blog with fellow bloggers on different communities such as Facebook Groups and get their input. Search engines analyze non-text content (image, video, and audio) different than text content. Here are a few tips on how to optimize non-text content on your blog:Text for Describing Non-Text ContentThis makes perfect sense as search engines try to find a correlation between the non-text content and the text describing it. A great tool which you can take advantage of is schema.org which includes all sort of microdata for different types of non-text components to enrich the content allowing the search engine to make more sense of that content.

Content Quality

If you’re serious about SEO, a great tool to invest in is MOZ Pro which gives you access to a lot of great resources to up your SEO game. One of the features of the pro account is access to on page grader. Simply add the URL of your page and the keyword you are intending to optimize your page with, and the on page grader gives you a report of how to optimize your page currently is and also a to-do list of how you can further you can optimize that page for your intended keyword.

The Importance of UGC (User Generated Content)

Having quality and new content on your site can drastically improve your SEO, however, we all know how challenging it is to come up with creative and engaging content every week. So you can take advantage of content created by your site visitors via the followings to get access to UGC and improve your SEO:

• Encourage visitors to comment on your site

• Get other bloggers to guest post on your blog

• Get your visitors to create content around a certain hashtag and feature non-text content on your site

3)Link-Building

Relevancy

Link building is the backbone of SEO. Search engines consider each link as a vote, however, all votes don’t have the same value. Links from the authoritative and relevant site have more value than links from sites that don’t have anything in common with your blog. For instance, if you are a fashion blogger and a fashion boutique links to your blog, search engines would put more value on that link.

Anchor Links

Another important factor in link building in the anchor text. The anchor text is the text which describes the link it is directed to. The more descriptive the anchor link is the higher value the search engines will put on that link. For instance, having an anchor link of wendy’s fall winter fashion trends compared to click here for fall winter trends by wendy, the first one is a much better description which makes it easier for search engines to understand where it is linking to so they put a higher value on the link.

Power of Social Media

A great way to improve your blog’s SEO by creating more links to your blog is social media. Social channels are a great way to connect with like-minded bloggers and to encourage them to link to your blog posts. There are blogger communities on Facebook and Twitter which allows bloggers to ask for favors from each other. You can connect with other relevant bloggers and get them to link to your blog posts via their social media and of course always leverage your own social accounts to amplify your blog’s reach.

Internal Links

Earning links from external sources which you don't have any control on can be challenging. But, don’t forget about the many link building opportunities you do have control on within your site. Linking your blog posts to your other relevant posts is a great way to optimize your site. This flow of information let the search engines know about the structure of your content.

Optimizing your site and improving its SEO ranking can seem like a daunting burden for every blogger. However, there are simple and easy steps to take to get a start on your SEO and gradually improve it.