What’s the point in writing beautiful words if nobody’s ever going to see them? It’s dispiriting to spend time and effort putting a fantastic blog post together and then getting no engagement after you hit the "post" button. If it happens too many times, you'll eventually give up on the idea of posting anything at all. That’s why the internet is littered with abandoned blogs, like an enormous cyber graveyard. If you’re demoralized because of one too many unappreciated blog posts recently, you've found the page. We like to think of ourselves as experts in the field, and we’re happy to offer you our insight.
There are several things you can do to improve the performance of your blog. Most of them relate to SEO. If you don't know what we mean by that, you'll do yourself a big favor by learning a few things about it. The term stands for "Search Engine Optimization" and relates to the way Google's algorithms analyze page content before awarding a ranking position. There are many places on the internet you can find out more about it, including some helpful advice provided by Google itself.
From this point on, we'll assume you've either read that advice, or you're already familiar with the basic principles of SEO, and we'll move on to the tips!
Find Long-Tail Keywords
Unless you have an enormous marketing budget and you're able to post hundreds of times a day, it's pointless trying to compete with the biggest blogs when it comes to keywords. The most obvious keywords related to your blogging topic will have been hit a million times by a thousand blogs bigger than yours, and you have almost no chance of breaking into the first page of search results any time soon. You can circumvent those obvious keywords by focusing on long-tail keywords instead. Hopefully, you'll already know what they are, but here’s another helpful guide if you're not sure. Once you've identified the appropriate keywords, use them not only in the body of your text but also in your headlines and titles. This amplifies their effectiveness when Google crawls your page.
Go Longer With Content
You might think that short, snappy posts are the way to go in the 2020s because people have short attention spans. That's not actually true. Long content almost always does better than short content when it comes to attracting clicks and keeping people on your blog site for longer. For clarity, a long blog post is anything that numbers more than 1100 words. Not only does this give you more space to work your keywords in, but it also gives you additional space for building in links. Those links, both internal and external, play a crucial role in the way Google "looks at" your page. It's easy to overload a short article with links and keywords, but when you have more space to play with, you should find you're able to do it without feeling like you have to force it.
Include Alt Text With Images
Articles with pictures are more attractive to readers than articles without them, but we’re sad to say that the same can’t be said about Google. The images you use on your posts are invisible from Google’s point of view, so they don’t do anything to help your page rankings. You can change that by adding alt text tags to your images. Your alt tags and text don’t appear to your readers, so you can use any combination of words you wish to without having to worry about whether they make sense in sequence or not. This is a good time to use your keywords repeatedly.
Keep URLs Short
The main URL for your homepage should be as short as possible. The URL for every page on your site shouldn't be much longer than that. You might have noticed a lot of web pages have very long URLs - perhaps even the full title of the article separated by hyphens. That doesn't go over well with Google. The shorter your URL is, the faster Google will be able to parse it. The faster Google can parse your page, the better it's likely to rank. If it's possible to do so, include a keyword or two in your URL for even better results. Don't force them in, though - if you can't include a keyword without making the URL unnecessarily long, don't do it.
Optimize Your Page For Loading Speed
Google has always included page loading speed in the way it ranks pages, and it's likely to lean on this factor even more heavily in the future. If your page is full of multimedia content that takes an age to load, you're shooting yourself in the foot. It's possible to have all the media you could ever want on your page without adding to the load time so long as you optimize it carefully. For inspiration, take a look at an online slots website. Do it now if you like. When you do, you'll almost certainly notice that the entire page loaded almost instantly, including a (presumably) long list of online slots that you can click on and play the moment you land. This doesn't happen by accident. We chose the online slots industry because it's exceptionally competitive and, therefore, exceptionally innovative. The way that the Rose Slots for New Zealand page loads is carefully calculated to give people what they want as quickly as possible, but also to appeal to Google. That’s the benchmark you’re aiming for. Anything over half a second is too long.
Write Posts Elsewhere
There are only so many hours in the day. If you run a blog, you probably want to use all your blogging time to write for your own blog. That makes sense, but it's probably counterproductive. You should already be aware of the biggest and most popular blogs within your chosen field. Most of them almost certainly accept guest posts because guest posts are essentially free content for the websites that take them. It's standard practice to allow guest posters to include a link back to their own website within the content of their posts. Not only does that help Google pick up on connections between your blog and a more popular blog, but it puts the readers of that blog one click away from finding you. Make sure the content you post is relevant, interesting, and represents you at your best, and you could get a huge boost almost immediately!
Knowing how to write is only half the battle when it comes to blogging. Knowing how to work with SEO and keywords is the other half, and you won’t succeed without that knowledge. We hope this article has pointed you in the right direction. It’s now down to you to carry on learning!
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