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How SEO Can Help Your Blog Rank Well

Posted By Jim Stewart 28th of March 2017 Search Engine Optimization 0 Comments

How SEO Can Help Your Blog Rank Well

In the final part of our three-part series on the WhatWhy and How of SEO and how it can be used to improve your blog’s rankings, we’ll be exploring how SEO can help your blog rank well.

Ranking well in the major search engines means added visibility for your blog. Visibility should eventually turn into conversions, so you are making money by learning SEO. The rules change often. The major search engines, led by Google, generate somewhere in the neighbourhood of 90% of all web traffic on the Internet. New viewers are much more likely to find your blog through Google than through any other medium, including friendly word of mouth. Obviously, ranking well is of vital importance!

Learning the nuances of how SEO helps the search engines rank pages can be incredibly helpful for SEO noobs. Once you learn the basic rules of why other blogs are winning, you can modify your strategies to win as well! Here are the ways that SEO can help your blog rank well.

Natural Organisation / The Macro theme

The major search engines are always looking to provide the most relevant results to its audience. To this end, Google created an unofficial ‘trust’ system, that takes into account a site’s trust, authority and expertise. The purpose is to give greater visibility and rankings to sites that are widely acknowledged as leaders or authorities in their chosen fields. While it has to be said that no one can say with certainty the metrics used to determine ‘authority’ it is thought to be based on aspects such as your social presence and quality of links that your site receives. It is Google’s way of recommending a site, or piece of content, that it determines would best answer a search query.

Part of SEO is learning how to organise your blog around relevant keywords so that the search engines associate your entire blog with an overall theme. Blogs that skip around from dog food to beach living to auto parts will find it difficult to rank for any of those subjects.

In Australia we have a saying: “jack of all trades, master of none.” The same applies to your blog. The blog that picks one subject and talks about every nuance of it will gain more visibility by becoming an authority on the subject. Creating a theme (the macro theme) is your first discipline when learning SEO.

Relevant Keywords in Individual Blogs

Within a macro theme, the search engines are looking to drill down even more. In order to provide even better results for their audiences, the search engines will place special relevance on blogs that answer a specific query. What are people asking about? Local topics and specific questions. As you write your blogs, you should look to answer specific questions in each of your pieces. This is what people are looking for, and if the search engines match your topic to a popular question, you will gain a great deal of visibility and may even achieve a Featured Answer position.

You signal the topic of your blogs to the search engines through keywords. Keywords are words that are the focus of your blog. For instance, if you are blogging about cat food, you are likely to use the terms “chicken” or “flavouring” more than “ignition” or “light fixture.”

Google has been around long enough to have accumulated masses of data regarding search terms and the predictive nature of searchers. Their algorithms can accurately predict relevant keywords associated with previous searches, making it easier for searchers to find relevant content that answers their query. It is imperative that you include accurate keywords relevant to your content, as the search engines will be looking for those keywords and phrases when determining the relevancy of your blog. Matching your keywords to the search engine’s assumptions of what your blog should contain is great SEO technique and boosts the visibility of your blog post.

How SEO Can Help Your Blog Rank Well | Featured Answer vs Number One Organic

Bringing Relevant Traffic to Your Blog

While the search engines are checking for keywords and other technical aspects of your writing, you should also check what real human traffic is doing. Search engines have the ability to track how long a visitor stays on your page with a metric known as the bounce rate. A high bounce rate means a visitor has left the page quickly, while a low bounce rate means the opposite. While the question of whether the bounce rate affects your rankings has long been dispelled (it doesn’t!), you can still use it to your advantage.

Bounce rate is not an accurate metric in the first instance, as many sites don’t utilise Google Analytics, leaving Google unable to track bounce rate information across the board. In other instances, a high bounce rate may be good for one page and bad for another. For example, if a contact page has a high bounce rate, then it may simply be that it is fulfilling its purpose; visitors complete the contact form before leaving.

What you can use bounce rate for is to monitor the quality of your site. Bounce rate can be an indicator of quality, but not as a weighting factor. A high bounce rate doesn’t equate to low rankings, but you can monitor pages on your site for a high bounce rate. That high rate may be due to low quality pages that you can improve to lower the bounce rate and improve your overall ranking.

Search engine optimisation is a complex discipline that people have written entire books about. There are entire blogs dedicated to the subject and the nuances of the process are only becoming more complicated as time goes on. However, the basics of SEO will never change.

Your main job is this: Create content that people want to see, and market it to them honestly! Do this, and SEO will work in your favour to make your blog rank well!

Jim Stewart, CEO of StewArt Media, is a recognised digital marketing expert. Jim is ProBlogger’s SEO expert and will share his vast SEO knowledge to equip you with the systems and skills to optimise and monetise your blog using tried and tested techniques. What Jim doesn’t know about SEO and blogging isn’t worth knowing.

About Jim Stewart
Jim Stewart, CEO of BloggersSEO, is a recognised digital marketing expert. Jim is ProBlogger’s SEO expert and will share his vast SEO knowledge to equip you with the systems and skills to optimise and monetise your blog using tried and tested techniques. What Jim doesn’t know about SEO and blogging isn’t worth knowing.
Comments
  1. Just goes to prove that SEO is still relevant, and a must needs when it comes to growing your blog and business online today. Great post Jim, thank you. As I have said a hundred times, SEO best practices have not changed with Google over the years, they just got better at finding who is following them, and who is not…

  2. After running a site for many years and neglecting SEO I realised that it was a major mistake. However, the cost of SEO on a continuous basis, at times seems higher than the returns.

  3. The whole “featured answer” thing is a game-changer. Now, I have to adapt, because if you aren’t featured, clicks are really going to drop, even if you are in the first actual spot. So, I assume that means actually putting the question in the post, with a (bulleted, if multi-part) response? Going to research this more specifically, but thanks for the posts!

  4. Hello Jim,

    Thanks for this informative post. Content is really plays a great role in SEO of a blog. Quality content helps you to optimize your blog and keywords also plays a vital role. I am also agree with you that bringing relevant traffic can help a lot and increase conversions.

  5. Do your keyword research

    Another aspect of using SEO for blogging is keywords. Keywords give your blog improved ‘searchability’; your blog will appear relevant whenever readers search related topics.

  6. Hey Jim,

    Google gives preference to fresh content and sites that are updated regularly. The secret to ranking well is to associate your blog with the keywords your customers are looking for and you have elaborated in very well manner.

    Blogs are a great way to bring brand new visitors to your website and your goal is to turn these readers into customers. Eventually, thanks for revealing a light on this topic.

    With best wishes,

    Amar kumar

  7. Hello,
    I think putting on good content is just half the work done, the main part lies in driving traffic to it. But in a way you are right without content your blog can not survive in the long run.
    If someone want to rely on content only then one can choose to market his content with the help of another content i.e Guest post.

  8. This reminds me of a friend who was desperate for a job one time and had to choose between picking a tedious clean-up job (had to clean up over 3000 articles that were never optimized for SEO) or simply trotting along and waiting for the next gig.

    I shall surely share this article with him. Thank you Jim.

  9. First of all, thank you for a great article.

    Well, I think SEO is the main thing to rank a website and 90% of SEO is keyword research if you have done properly keyword research than with the help of some link you can rank for sure and if you pick the wrong keyword than chances really low to rank.

  10. hey,
    Research is the thing i do rank my blog while doing SEO. I research every possible thing may it be audience or My competitors. It gives you a idea of approach for your blog too.
    Thanks for the amazing article.

  11. Hi, you explain the the bounce rate not entirely right. It is all about if a visitor watches more than 1 page. A high bounce rate means that a visitor has only seen 1 page, while a low bounce rate means he or she has watch more.

  12. hi, for relevant keywords I use LSI keywords to add more info regarding my targeted keywords….long tail keywords are mainly responsible for generating relevant traffic….thanks for such informative post…!!!!

  13. Excellent post, thanks for sharing. Couldn’t agree more with your message, keyword targeting is crucial. And Nothing drives Targeted Traffic like S.E.O.

  14. Dear Jim
    I just wanted to say a huge thank you for this article and all of the other fantastic content you guys provide. My husband and I recently launched our new website and blog your site has been absolutely invaluable to us – from leading us through the setup to keeping us pointed in the right direction when we start to get a little lost. I’m now a subscriber and looking forward to all the knowledge I know I’ll be able to glean from both your archives and future posts. All the best in 2017 and thanks again for all the amazing work you do!

  15. Very Informative, Thank you. I’ve been blogging on and off for almost 3 years, but has never had much of a focus.

  16. Hi Jim,

    It’s an amazing post regarding SEO and truly this is one of the most complete guides on the subject, i must say you’ve shared an extraordinary guide.

    It was fascinating to get this great post. Your post just made me happy.

  17. Hello Jim!
    You are doing a great job by posting such an informative and briliant posts regarding SEO.
    Content in blog should be unique and your blogs always show uniqueness. A big thanks for this post.
    Keep Posting!!!

  18. “Create content that people want to see, and market it to them honestly” this summaries all. Writing content for your audience and not for search engines and bring relevant traffic to your blog. Thanks it was great read.

  19. Hello Jim ,
    Wonderful Post I Know That The SEO Is The most important part of any types of blog no any blogs can rank without seo so this post was fantastic for newbie bloggers like me :)

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  21. Prateektechnosoft says: 06/07/2017 at 9:18 pm

    Thanks for your nice information. SEO is more powerful to get in search engine result page. It helps the SEO to get rank for your blog page.

  22. Thanks for sharing. Very useful information for me. Great Job.

  23. Traffic along with backlinks will help your SEO more then any other method.

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