Blog SEO: How to Create Content That Ranks Fast

How to Create Content That Ranks Fast and Increases your Website Visibility in 10 Easy Steps + Podcast!

We first wrote this article on how to write blog posts that rank over on our older platform on Juleskalpauli.com back on November 30, 2015. 7 years later there has been a plethora of updates on Google and other search engines making it a wee bit harder to rank your content in Search aka SERPs. Still, there are some parts that work a charm and a few updates we will be sharing with you here.

Because every web master’s dream is to attract traffic while you sleep, right? Well, there is some work to do so let’s get to it. 

You on iOS, then tune in or download the podcast on iTunes below 

 

We were asked how we keep presenting posts that attract a targeted audience.

And the answer is, there is no magic wand. It’s all about content promotion. As the saying goes:

If the content is King, content promotion is Queen for sure.

We learned way back from Ray Higdon and Peter Montoya that your blog/website is your most powerful web marketing tool and can be the source of continuous residual income. But only if you get eyeballs from your ideal audience or customer! This article was also inspired by Amy Porterfield’s original article.

We share some simple tweaks and extras in this article that you can make to your content a honey pot and should help increase your SEO and visibility. Leading to more organic traffic, more leads, and sales…Cool?

Let’s get it…

 

1. Do You OWN Your Domain?

Here is the deal, although we are huge fans of, Blogger, Wix, WordPress. Yet we don’t encourage you to run a business blog with a wix.com, WordPress.com, or blogger.com domain, period.

 

RELATED How to Write SEO Friendly Blog Posts 2021 and Rank on Google

 

Here is the reality, when we blog on someone else’s domain, as above we’re building their search engine visibility, not ours…that’s the honest truth!

Here is the scary bit and why we urge you to back up each and every bit of your blog posts on such hosted domains either on Evernote, IFTTT, or as word documents… Many blogging platforms have folded along with people’s awesome content in the past few years. Even if you are able to save your articles and content, you’ll never recover all your inbound links and the trust you built up, on that domain… 

It’s critical to your success that you OWN YOUR domain name PERIOD. Don’t say we never warned you!

 

2. Blogging SEO: Link Your e-Store to Your blog For SEO & Visibility:
How often have you found that you post a sales page on social media and it gets no traction and you post a vlog or tutorial on the same topic with your sales page and you get better engagement?

You see blogs are meant to be more like a conversation, so by nature, they shouldn’t be pitchy. The training and tips approach also encourages other bloggers to link to you. Trust when we say they would be less likely to link to an e-commerce site.

Our goal has always not been to have the most popular content, rather to build our business. Similarly, if you wish to leverage your content to grow your business, you’ll want to create keyword-rich links from blog posts to sales pages on your website.

RELATED: 5 Steps to More Sales By Split testing or Ab Testing!

We encourage you to grab our highly converting Complimentary PDF DOWNLOAD “Product Keyword Research Guide” below.

A blog post about tips for non-profits links to your page that sells coaching for voluntary organizations. A post about finding the right nutritional supplements for a baby boomer might link to your page on Healthy foods and recipes for families.

Remember search engines focus on the link words, so avoid using links with such verbiage as “Learn more here” or “click here.” You will find that this reduces your site SEO when you use tools like similarweb to check. You’ll want to create links that use the phrase for the article title e.g. “nutritional supplements for baby-boomers.”

How about encouraging guest blogging. Create multiple content pieces esp. guest blogs that point to a given page on your site. This will help increase the search engine visibility of any of your web pages.

 

3. Use The Right Plugin for your On-page SEO

Back in 2015, we used the Yoast SEO plugin for our on-page SEO. Today we use the RankMath plugin and find it way more user-friendly. That said we aren’t plugging RankMath to you, its simply a recommendation we use, and to each their own.

Still, we assume you do have an expert helping you with SEO or at least are using a Search Engine Optimization plugin for your website, right?

If WordPress is your CMS, then you are spoilt for choice. We use RankMath because we get way more functionality than what Yoast offers after its 2015 update.

RankMath advises you on how best to improve your content for better SERPs. And it does have a paid and free version and a massive competition for Yoast!

The RankMath SEO Plugin is the one we will focus on today.

This SEO plugin helps you write SEO-friendly blog posts. You start by typing your focus keyword in the appropriate box. After you have checked that it will rank better for your post and bring the “Low hanging fruit.” RankMath plugin uses several criteria (see image below of what it does check). This helps with making your content, web pages, and blog posts SEO-friendly and as the image below shows, it lets you know where you may be falling short!

RankMath plugin checks whether or not you used your keyword in 6 important locations:

• Article-heading,
• The title of the page,
• URL of the page,
• The content inside the article,
• the meta-description,
• And as an image alt-tag.

It also ensures that your readers will have a good experience. And this is the one that we used to struggle with. The flesh reading score…But we since learned to write shorter sentences and things got lots better!

It calculates the number of words vis-à-vis the density of your focus keyword in the post. And also lets you know if that keyword has been used on other posts or pages on your website use the same focus keyword. You want each and every post to rank as opposed to competing with yourself, right!

You get the GREEN LIGHT and an SEO score up to 100 if your post meets the above criteria, and every green spot improves your post ranking in search engines. BUT not every spot needs to be green. We have posts that still ranked high despite having a couple of oranges and even Red Spots in the criteria e.g. the one above!

 

4. Content Calendar: Use Keywords

We did talk about creating a content calendar before. Once you do that you will have topics on tap. Hopefully, you will have researched and found that they are keyword-rich topics.

And if you are a busy blogger, business owner, or even smart corporate and need keyword-rich SEO optimized content created for you, K-Web Social Designs are at your service. This of course includes a content calendar. 

 

You do know that every blog post you write essentially is a mini web page, right? And every web page is a fresh opportunity to rank well for a specific keyword or search by your target audience, for a long time to come! If you create content that is evergreen your website will attract visitors, subscribers, and sales all year long! If its SEO is done properly.

It’s essential that you keep checking social media, and search engines for trending topics and questions from your target market! Once you spot a topic that suits your niche and is part of your content calendar topics, do a keyword search we use the Mozilla SEO tool, which is free with mega resources. Plus several other Whitehat SEO steps we take for each post we create. 

Find out how competitive that keyword is. The higher the competition, the tougher it is to get onto page 1 of the search engines. Once you have your keyword, create your content calendar topics around the word or subject! And create your fresh content aka blog posts around that keyword/phrase. Each page on your website that meets the right criteria will increase your search engine ranking. Think of each page as a new opportunity to try for the top rank aka page 1 of Google!

 

5. Blogging and SEO – Use your keyword or phrase in your copy often.

Your title is the start, then you want to see that keyword in your post content and copy. It should definitely be included in your first sentence in the 1st paragraph. Repeat it naturally in the rest of your post. If you have noticed, we simply open our posts with an overview of our topic 1-2 sentences tops and highlight it too.

Caution: Don’t keyword stuff your content, as we all know could cause you trouble and backfire on your SEO agenda. Google and other search engines may punish you for “over-optimizing” your post.

 

6. Blog SEO- Is your Title Keyword Rich?

If you are creating a blog post, then the post title will by default, become the title of your “web page.” Google and other search engines give more credence to your page title as the top criteria. Usually, WordPress will use your title by default as your permalink. It’s thus good practice to ensure your keyword/phrase is included.

Check your permalink to ensure it also reads right and contains your keyword/phrase.

Don’t use vague or non-commercial titles for your posts if you wish to attract a targeted commercial audience. We have handled this particular topic in our post on keyword research for niche markets. We often see awesome blogs with a lackluster title. If you struggle with this we got you covered

We recommend that you check out our post on How to Create Killer blog Titles too. See your ideal customers aren’t searching for your post if the title doesn’t stand out for all the right reasons.

 

 

7. Blog SEO: Maximizing Visibility and Ranking for your Blog Post:

We have learned to mostly use numbers in our blog titles e.g. 9 Super hacks to speed up your website. Note we use an odd number…Again it works best that way!

Lead with the keyword in the title! This helps the bots find it faster and thus weigh better for your post. E.g. Keyword research: how to do it right for your blog. The 2 lead words are the Keyword…no pun intended.
You could break up your keywords. If you wanted to rank well for, say, “K-Web Social Website Design,” you could use that phrase exactly once or twice, but also use just “K-Web Social Designs” and “Website Design” separately in other instances.

 

8. Blog SEO: Social Sharing Myths busted:

Google and other search engines do use Social Shares as one of your content ranking criteria. Sadly back in 2015, Twitter decided to pull the plug on its social share counts links and effectively decimated most websites’ social proof, and possibly ranking too!

Of course, there is always a fix for that, and some plugins even allow you to recover your share counts, within reason. 

When someone shares your post on social media or networks and also comments, such links from social media & comments carry the “no follow” link. Meaning no search engine benefits are being transferred. BUT they do bring Social Proof and good to read” kind of advantage to your web page.

Google is especially ambiguous and grey on how much impact social shares have on blog search results.

But here is the good news undoubtedly Facebook powers Bing’s customized search.

Obviously, having your Google Listing optimized increases your Google search results.

More social shares on your web pages equate to a measure of “popularity” also known as Social Proof. Now other types of links are:

• Inbound links
• Outbound links

Inbound links- are links from other websites and blogs. These unlike social shares do increase your search engine visibility, we like them!

By you sharing and having your audience share your post on social media platforms; by the law of averages, you’ll drive more traffic to your blog. This in turn gets it ranking even more and further builds awareness of your website.

Here is our insight on this blogging and SEO: if we keep sharing who knows what a tweet, Facebook share, or a Pin could do even if it may not necessarily boost our overall ranking!

 

An influencer may like what they see. They may connect to or link to us. This is link juice as you know, which does carry search engine weight. That’s why we have social share buttons on all our posts and pages. It’s also why we have every image socially shareable. Simply hover on an image and you will like magic have a Social media Icon and link ready for you to Tweet, Pin or Facebook share. 

It’s always important to remember that having lots of links to your site doesn’t equate to site authority. It purely depends on the linking website authority, to pass on link juice to yours. Authority is derived from sites that are deemed trustworthy or authoritative and must have some kind of relation to the blog topic.

 

9. Blogging and SEO – Fresh Content better Visibility:

First things first; fresh content has to be better than any previous content on the topic to rank better.

This one has become a lil controversial of late: Does fresh content help your website rank higher and faster? The answer is not necessarily!

You see search engines prefer to serve users searching with a keyword query, with an optimal user experience. They thus seek fresh, up-to-date content from websites and pages. For instance, Google calls this: Query Deserves Freshness or QDF. And as you know the best optimized pages get the holy grail of organic search traffic.

A deeper diver shows that QDF is a system of identifying search terms that are trending, with the most up-to-date or recent information showing up top in search results. So if you get it right you qualify for QDF based traffic, and this among other things is what you need:

1. Fresh Up to date Content, and
2. Having the right terms on your webpage.

This sounds simple, so why don’t more websites or blogs rank? Because as we all know Google algorithms are complicated and secret. They keep changing them every year. And, so much more is at stake here.

Therefore, simply having “fresh content” doesn’t mean you automatically qualify for QDF. If your content has target terms that aren’t QDF associated, then you won’t get any QDF benefit, regardless of how fresh your content is!

You really ought to be back-linking your new content to your old content to make the most of the relevancy/link value. And also to refresh your old content, so it’s not archived by search engines forever!

That’s why we have refreshed this article from our Juleskalpauli website and moved it to our new platform right here.

Interlinking your posts is great for site structure and internal links in general. Having several posts in a category aka topical groups can help consolidate your site and give a better impression to the Search Engines. It also helps SE bots to see what terms are present and likely associated.

 

10. Wrapping up – Blogging and SEO:

To have a website that is visible in search, that attracts organic traffic is what every webmaster dreams of.

Don’t forget to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly and is optimized for responsiveness. Some themes have this inbuilt. For the rest, there are plugins to the rescue, and we use the WP touch plugin!

 

 

So quick recap:

• Own & Control your domain.
• Link your e-commerce or e-store to your blog if you have one.
• Use the right SEO plugins.
• Create a Content Calendar using Keyword research!
• Keyword Rich blog post. Populate your keyword/phrase in your headlines and content body, without over-optimizing!
• The title should have your Keyword/s.
• Ensure your blog and website are socially shareable.
• Always add Optimized Fresh content.
• It’s essential to optimize your images of course and Try to include a Pinterest Optimized image if you leverage Pinterest for business!
• Watch out for those duplicate topic tags. HubSpot actually handled this point in their post on SEO-friendly blog posts read it!
• Also, ensure your categories are not duplicated as that could cause you a google ding! 

It’s always advisable to check your blog SEO and we did share some 37 incredibly useful tools to help you out. You could also use Google’s SEO section in Webmaster Tools, we recommend bookmarking it for regular checks.

More Blogging and SEO Training for you: Super-tips-to-promote-your-content 9-super-hacks-speed-up-your-website 4-tips-to-user-friendly-site Social-media-marketing-search-engine-online-pr 4-costly-search-engine-mistakes The ultimate guide to increase-traffic-to-your-blog

Well if you enjoyed our Blog SEO – How to Create Content That Ranks Fast post and you have some more SEO tips, how about first you like & share this post. Then share your tips below, we’d love to hear from you!

 

 

Julie Syl Kalungi

Live. Learn. Love

---

Considering coaching? Check out our eStore Tab where we help people every day.