Over 80% of blogs stagnate with
no traffic and few readers but the difficulty often lies with how people are
invited to participate.
Simply having one doesn’t make
it produce results.
What are the most efficient
ways to get blog posts read?
·
Sharing
on social media
·
Using
an email list to distribute new posts
·
Google
or Facebook advertising to drive awareness
·
Search
Engine Optimization (SEO)
Using ALL of these options is perfect, but if you can only choose one,
then SEO gets vote every time.
If you have a few hours to put
in, here are THREE WAYS to change
your WordPress blog (or website) into a search-friendly traffic generator.
1.
Install a good SEO plug-in.
My favorite free SEO solution is WordPress SEO by Yoast, which makes it simple
as red light, yellow light, and green light. Pretty obvious, right? But remember
that setting up it isn’t useful in and of itself – and many bloggers stop at
this first step. Its real power lies in understanding how to employ it properly
and decide the right keywords.
2.
Do keyword research.
Head over to the Google Keyword Popularity Tool and devote some time in keyword
research to comprehend which keywords drive the most traffic. The trick with
keywords is to never presume you know which ones are best; ALWAYS research to make sure you are using popular keywords that
best suit your product, service and/or blog topic.
If you use localized keywords
for your SEO efforts – such as “az life coach” or “life coach in phoenix”
rather than just “life coach,” you are much more likely to rank well – with the
extra advantage of landing more targeted readers. This is particularly
significant if you are a local business.
I advocate creating a free
account on AdWords (or log-in to your account, if you have one), then search
for the keywords you think are most likely to be searched. Adding your city and
state will give you local search results to review, plus some great thoughts
for blog posts that fit what people are seeking. Using the keywords you put in,
Google will bring up a list of keywords actually searched the previous month. I
prefer to export them to Excel, get rid of needless columns, and rank them from
most to least popular, then save the document for easy reference later.
3.
Choose one keyword, then incorporate it in your post permalink, title and first
sentence.
If you have WordPress set to
name the page URL as your post name (settings> permalinks> post name),
this will automatically put the keyword in your post URL – also called the
permalink. This is a vital component for SEO success.
Then, just use the default text
for the “SEO title” field at the bottom of the page (which is your title plus
the name of your blog), and copy the first sentence of the post into the “Meta
Description” field. If good writing dictates NOT using the keyword in the first
sentence (which happens frequently but is not optimal), then paste in the first
blog sentence that DOES have the keyword in it, or write one that uses the keyword
and describes the post in a way that people would like to read it. Put the
keyword in the “Meta Keywords” field, and then you are all done.
SEO
magic occurs when
you spot one keyword to focus on, then put it in the trifecta of permalink,
page title and page description.
Ensure that keyword is
incorporated in the body of post a few times, as related and appropriate, hit
publish and you are good to go.
One
last note – Be
certain and offer NUMEROUS WAYS for readers to subscribe. If you can’t convert
them to subscribers via email or RSS and/or they aren’t seeing your new posts,
odds are good they won’t think to revisit your site. Your SEO may bring them to
your blog the first time, but it may not bring them back.
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