The use of the internet is rapidly increasing. People are more reliant on the digital world for most tasks. Another thing people have started relying on the internet is the source of their income.
The recent events of COVID leading into lockdown have further increased the earnings on digital platforms. Many people have started their businesses. Many have started using their skills to provide content writing, copywriting, video editing, graphic designing, and even website development and designing.
Other than making money, online platforms have also given people the opportunity to showcase their talent and skills and follow their passion and make a career out of it. One such thing is blogging.
What is Blogging?
Originally known as a weblog, a blog was earlier used for logging someone’s regular activities. It is similar to one’s private journal, where you dump out whatever is in your mind, except a weblog is accessible to everyone on the internet.
In the past many years, blogs have become popular, and people have started writing about what they are passionate about.
Now, a blog can be about anything. It can be related to technical information, food, fashion, lifestyle, medicines, or career advice. You can write about anything you know or like to talk about in a blog.
You can create your website to publish your content. Many other websites let bloggers post their content for free.
Besides letting you talk about what you like, blogging can also give you an excellent career. Many people have started blogging as a full-time career and are earning well. You may need to invest some time initially without getting anything back.
Why do Bloggers need SEO?
SEO or Search Engine Optimization is used to rank your website on the first page of Google. Websites that rank on the first page of google get most of the traffic. A blogger also needs to follow SEO algorithms to rank their blogs on google to get traffic.
A blogger earns either by the donations made on their website or by the ads that show up on their web pages. Either way, they need people to visit their website. More visits lead to more AdSense.
With the help of SEO or hiring a SEO Agency, you can improve your website performance and increase the number of visits to your website. For this, you can either learn SEO on your own or hire someone who knows the technicalities behind it. But, if you are a writer and write content for your blog, it is necessary to understand the basics of SEO even if you hire an SEO specialist.
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Tips of SEO Practices (500)
There are some basic rules of SEO that help you generate more traffic and reach a wider audience without much effort. You just need to take care of a few things while brewing content for your blogging website. You can start with the following tips to start with to optimize your web pages-
1. Specify Your Goals – Even before setting up your website, you need to specify your goals for the website. You need to understand the purpose of starting the blog, the audience you want to relate to, and the type of content you want to publish.
2. Study your competitors – It is also very important before starting your website to research your competitors well, their marketing strategies, and how they are running their websites to generate traffic.
3. Use Mobile Optimized website – Any search engine wants to provide the best experience to their users, so mobile-optimized websites are their favorite. The user can access this website from their phones with ease. Get mobile-friendly responsive website designed by the team of best web designers in India
4. Use Keywords wisely – Dig deep into the research process of your keywords. Use focus keywords and long-tail keywords wisely. The use of the right keywords and using them in the correct way can impact your SEO a lot.
5. Use meta description properly – Meta descri[ption in the easiest words can summarize the web page. Using meta descriptions correctly will help the search engine understand what that particular web page contains and deliver a link to that web page in the search results.
6. Use image alt tags – an alt tag, also known as alt description or alt attribute, is the description on an image used in the blog. It helps the search engine understand the image’s information and helps display the web page in search results.
7. Short-tail and Long-tail keywords – Bothe short-tail and long-tail keywords have their specific advantage. So, to rand up your website in google, you need to use a good mix of both types of keywords.
8. Use long-form content – Long-form content has always resulted in a better ranking than short-form content. So, create long and deeply researched blogs, but keep in mind to avoid the fluff and make your blogs as informative as possible.
Basic Tools for SEO
Researching is the most important part of blogging, and the next is keyword research. Your keywords play the most important role in ranking on the first page. There are many SEO tools available in the market that help you find perfect keywords for your blog, and these tools can help you in multiple ways to increase visitors to your website. Here are the top-picked tools for bloggers-
1. Ahrefs
Use Tools, Learn updates, and Join The Community
Ahrefs has a reason to be at the top of the list. It is one of the most used tool-set around the globe. Ahrefs provides you with tools for your keyword research and provides you with many learning materials. It also lets you join the community to stay updated and connected to people who can add up to your growth.
Ahref is a toolkit for keyword research and gives you many other options to improve your website’s SEO. Here is what you can do with Ahrefs-
- Site Audit – Aherf gives you a very clear picture of your website’s performance. It crawls through all the web pages of your website to give you a genuine SEO score. Not only This report shows you where your website is doing well, but it also explains where it lags and what can be done to fix the problems.
- Explore other websites – Aherf also lets you see another website’s performance. You can use this to analyze your competitors’ websites and understand their performance. You can also analyze the drawback of their website and be conscious of your website.
- Extensive Keyword research – With Aherfs, you can perform extensive keyword research. It gives you different keywords to choose from leading to trending content ideas.
- Get global Results – The keyword research is done based on the data of 171 countries. It uses search engines like Google, Youtube, Bing, Baidu, etc to give the most accurate and relatable results.
- SEO Metrics – Get metrics like Return Rate, Clicks per search, % of clicks, % of paid clicks, and many more.
Pricing – There are 4 plans available by Aherf with different features. The monthly plan starts from $99 and goes upto $399. You can choose according to your need for features.
2. Semrush
Semrush is another very popular tool for SEO. As a blogger Semrush can be helpful to you in many ways. You can choose the plan according to your need and update or downgrade it whenever required. Other than keyword research, they also provide many other features that you are gonna need as a content creator. The features provided by Semrush are –
- SEO Tools – The Semrush SEO tools are great to understand the performance of your website. It has an extremely robust set of tools to handle not only the content part but also the social media and marketing aspects of your work. Any business needs recognition and when you are working on digital platforms, your business needs digital recognition through social media and other marketing ways.
- Positon tracking – It is another tool used for SEO where you can compare the position of any keyword in upto 20 rivalry sites side-by-side.
- Content Marketing Tools – The content marketing tools of Semrush is also a very useful part of the website for content creators. It allows you to research the content ideas and brainstorm the best-suited ideas for your niche.
- Market Research – With these tools, you can do extensive market research for your blog and create something that is wonderful and best of all.
- Advertising – If you are a full-time blogger and want to create a full-time income out of your blogging website, you just need to follow the marketing trends including organic advertising. With the advertising tools of Semrush, you can research your competitors landing pages, optimize local advertising, Analyze google shopping and campaigns, and much more.
- Social Media – Social media platforms are one of the greatest platforms to flex your skills. You can attract a potential audience to your website through these platforms. You can schedule posts, analyze performance, and track and compare your competitors through the Social media tools of Semrush.
Pricing – Semrush provides a free trial and you can choose from the following free plans after that expires. The plans available are –
- Pro – Perfect for newbies, this plan is $119.95/mo.
- Guru – The plan costs $229.95/mo, and is perfect for growing agencies.
- Business – The plan is for $449.95/mo and is great for large enterprises.
3. Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is a very unique tool among all the other tools. Scream frog works as a crawler that helps you improve your SEO by extracting and auditing the data. These spider tools do the following analysis on your website-
- Find broken Links – Broken links impact your SEO game in many ways. They affect time on site, bounce rate, and conversion rate. This spider tool crawls the entire website to find out 404 errors or broken links.
- Analyze Page Titles & Meta Data – Page titles and meta tags play an important part in SEO. It finds out the title and tags that do not fit the SEO requirements and lets you know where the update is needed.
- Generates sitemaps – The sitemap of a website helps the browser to know all the URLs available on the website for crawling. It helps the browser to find out the webpage while crawling and increases the number of visits.
- Schedule Audits – It allows you to schedule the crawls at timely intervals at the chosen time and export the data at your preferred location or even on google sheets.
- Discover Duplicate Content – Screaming Frog uses md5 algorithmic check to check duplicate data around the website so you can remove it.
- Other than that, it crawls JavaScript Websites, Extracts data with Xpath, Integrates with GA, GSC, PSI, Visual Site Architecture, and much more to improve the SEO ranking of your blogs on search engines.
Pricing – Screaming Frog has a free version that only has some basic features. The feature included in the free version are-
- Find Broken Links, Errors & Redirects
- Analyse Page Titles & Meta Data
- Review Meta Robots & Directives
- Audit hreflang Attributes
- Discover Exact Duplicate Pages
- Generate XML Sitemaps
- Site Visualisations
- 500 Crawl Limit
If you want to upgrade features, you can pay to get them. The paid version of Screaming frog come for £149.00 Per Year and includes the following features-
- Find Broken Links, Errors & Redirects
- Analyse Page Titles & Meta Data
- Review Meta Robots & Directives
- Audit hreflang Attributes
- Discover Exact Duplicate Pages
- Generate XML Sitemaps
- Site Visualisations
- Crawl Limit
- Scheduling
- Crawl Configuration
- Save Crawls & Re-Upload
- JavaScript Rendering
- Crawl Comparison
- Near Duplicate Content
- Custom robots.txt
- AMP Crawling & Validation
- Structured Data & Validation
- Spelling & Grammar Checks
- Custom Source Code Search
- Custom Extraction
- Google Analytics Integration
- Search Console Integration
- PageSpeed Insights Integration
- Link Metrics Integration
- Forms-Based Authentication
- Store & View Raw & Rendered HTML
- Free Technical Support
4. Woorank
Woorank is another website optimizer that can help bloggers gain visits and improve their website’s performance. It has divided the tools according to different positions, and you can choose what you want to do with your website. They have tools for the sales teams, marketing teams, small businesses, data analysts, and developers. Being a blogger your primary goal will be marketing. You’ll have to promote your blogs to increase the number of visits which eventually will lead to profit. You can perform the following things with the tools of Woorank-
- Site Review – You can input the URL of your website and review your site. You can see how your website is performing and what are the issues that need to be resolved on the website.
- Site Audit – The site audit runs a deep crawl on your website and checks the gaps and cracks for a smooth SEO process. It checks all the web pages individually and finds out the issues that need to be fixed according to SEO.
- Keyword Tracking – It lets you perform extensive keyword research tools to help you come up with something that can beat your competition. You can also find keywords according to your locality to have a better impact. You can also strategize the target keywords according to their potential. You can also analyze and find the keywords that perform better in google’s research.
- Lead Generation – Woorank is connected to zapoer’s connections to get the data that can be used for potential lead generation. You can use this data to know the audience that is interested in the niche you write in and advertise your website to them.
- White-label report – Woorank provides a white-label report feature where you can customize your website with eye-catching templates. It also helps you to monitor keywords, analyze traffic, and use custom advice for a high-performing website.
- Extensions – They also provide a few extensions for better website performance.
Pricing – Woorank provides the following plans
- Pro – Costs at $79.99 per month, it provides the following features-
- Optimize 1 website
- Track 50 keywords
- Analyze max. 2500 pages
- Unlimited PDF reports
- Premium- This plan costs $199.99 and provides the following features-
- Optimize 5 website
- Track 250 keywords
- Analyze max. 2500 pages
- Unlimited white-label PDF reports
3. Enterprise – This plan provides the following features-
- Extra projects
- Extra keywords
- Integration with CRM, CRP
- Team access and SSO login
