In order to be effective blogging in today’s Internet, writers also need to realize that knowing about search engine optimization (SEO) isn’t left to programmers are Internet marketers. It’s no longer enough to write amazing content and expect it to get thousands of hits every month, much less each day.
Bloggers should know basic SEO techniques and keep up with the latest search engine trends and news in order to be successful with their blog posts.
Best SEO Practices Increase Traffic
Knowing what search engines are looking for can help you maintain best practices, which should increase your chances of regular search engine ranking and indexing. For instance, did you know that Google recently released a new feature called In-Depth articles, which they give special preference to articles that are 1500 words or more? In addition, Google is also looking out for duplicate content, which is content that is appeared on a different website or the same website before, as well as relevancy of content (which is part of its freshness factor). All of these attributes contribute toward greater traffic to your blog.
Drive More Engagement
making your blog better optimized for search engines also means optimizing it in the best possible way for your audience. Both search engines and readers appreciate fresh, new content that is well sourced and easy-to-read. Focusing on these types of blog posts can help increase search traffic and overall engagement on your post, which means more social shares and comments.
Know What Isn’t Working
along with knowing search engine optimization best practices, you should also know what the worst practices are. In the SEO community, there are two types of marketers: white hat and black hat. White hat SEO marketers focused on high-quality tactics that are geared towards what Google and other search engines want to see, like high-quality content. Conversely, black hat SEO are tactics that marketers have developed to “game” the search engines, like keyword stuffing, buying links and traffic, and hiding code for keywords throughout your website. Google is now cracking down on many bad SEO tactics (and even forbidding some shady websites from appearing in their search results), so it’s important to know what practices are bad seed can avoid them.
Where to Find Help
In no particular order, here are some great resources for bloggers that want to learn more about Internet marketing and search engine optimization:
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