As you start a blog or if you already have started one, the most important question that you mostly have is how to drive traffic to your blog. Well, in that case, there are several things that you need to worry about.
How quality of your content is
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your blog
Among the above-mentioned, SEO is a major part of a blog's success. In this article, we are going to discuss what is SEO, why SEO is important for blogging, and how.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In simpler words, SEO is improving your blog's visibility more and more when users are searching for products, services, or answers to questions via search engines like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo.com, and other search engines. In other words, SEO is a practice of improving the appearance and positioning of your blogs' pages in organic search results.
FYI, Instead of conventional marketing tactics, organic search results are those listings on a search engine results page (SERP) that show up due to variables like relevancy to the search phrase and legitimate search engine optimization (SEO) activities.
SEO is a vast process but can be successfully done with the right methods. First of all, let's see what is inside SEO. This vast subject can be part down into three main categories.
Technical SEO
On-Page SEO
Off-Page SEO
1. Technical SEO
This is the first stage of the search engine optimization (SEO) process. As same as the name says, in technical SEO, there is nothing to do in user-visible areas of your blog. In other words, technical SEO does not include any process for the content or UI (user interface) of the blog. What technical SEO has got to work with is the settings that you are required to configure to make the crawling process done by the search engines easier. Usually, once you work with technical SEO it will not bother you again.
For example, you can get the help of Google Search Console in this process. However, remember that if you have issues crawling your blog, it affects the improvement of your blog by low traffic and engagement. Nobody can visit your blog unless it is not available to be seen in the search engine results. Creating a sitemap, canonical links (click here to see what is a canonical link), and requesting to crawl URLs of newly published pages instead of letting them crawl automatically: which takes a lot of time; are some of the example processes that take place in the technical SEO phase.
Moreover, it takes time to receive the results of technical SEO efforts. So, be wise to choose the right processes to do technical SEO; otherwise, it will be a waste of money, time, and effort. We will talk about technical SEO deeply in an upcoming article.
2. On-Page SEO
This is the second stage of the SEO process which basically deals with the content and other elements found on your blog pages. In other words, content and UI, and other user-visible elements. What on-page SEO does is provide search engine crawlers enough signs and signals that they can understand the meaning of the context of your blog content.
“In terms of search engine rankings, I like to think of blogging as fishing. The more hooks you have in the water, the more likely you are to catch a fish. In the same way, as you add more content to your site, more pages from your domain become indexed in search engines. This improves organic search visibility and increases website traffic.”
Jayson DeMers
In simple words, search engine crawlers do not understand the context of the blog as same as a human does. But yes! Search engine crawlers do understand the context of blog pages. What is actually happening there is that they are looking for some signals to figure out what a particular blog page is about. For example, the exact keywords and related keywords used to search the particular blog page. And not only that but also they check for signals by looking for related images, links, excerpts, slugs, etc. If those mentioned factors are there found, search engine crawlers receive the signals and line up the relevant search results for you.
In on-page SEO, you will have to deal with internal links, headings, image alt texts, keywords, meta tags, excerpts, slugs, and blog structures that can send correct signals to search engines. Not only on-page SEO helps search engine crawlers to understand the context of the blog content but also it improves the usability and credibility of a blog.
3. Off-Page SEO
This is the third step of the SEO process. Off-page SEO is the phase that includes promotion processes. Some people identify this step as link building step we call it blog promotion instead of link-building because there is so much happening rather than just link-building. “But how does website promotion helps my blog?” This is what happens. When a user types and searches for something, search engine algorithms look into their index and try to find the best pages that satisfy the user’s requirements. Backlinks are one of the factors which determine the position of a blog page in the search results.
But does it happen? Here is how backlinks do their job. Search engines identify backlinks as good signals of trust and depending on where the links are coming from. As I explained earlier signals mean ranking higher right? So if those signals are from good and trusted sites ranking will become positive which means it will rank higher.
Based on above mentioned three sectors, your SEO strategies lies within.
Importance of SEO
To understand the importance of SEO, let’s first see what is actually happening behind the screen when a user searches for something.
Imagine a situation you searched “Blogging platforms” on a search engine. After you hit “Search”, you will get a page full list of results. The first one or two results are mostly based on ads on Google. You can see whether it is an ad or not because search engines like Google leave a mark called “Ads” near each result that ads. Apart from ads, all the results are based on SEO. Paying for ads is not something permanent. That is why you need to gain users’ trust and bring your blog among the first 10 results to bring organic traffic to your blog. Unlike paid search ads, you can’t pay search engines to get higher organic search rankings, which means you must do SEO to obtain the success you are looking for.
Crawlers, often known as bots or spiders, are used by search engines like Google and Bing to collect data on all the content they can locate online. Starting from a well-known web page, the crawler tracks both internal links to pages on that particular site and external links to pages on other sites. The crawler can grasp what each website is about and how it is semantically connected to all the other pages in the search engine’s enormous database, called an index, thanks to the content on those pages and the context of the connections it followed.
The search engine utilizes sophisticated algorithms to compile what it considers to be the most accurate and helpful list of results for a user’s input into the search box. These natural results may contain text-heavy web pages, news stories, pictures, videos, listings for nearby businesses, and other specialized material. The algorithms used by search engines are made up of a variety of parameters, all of which are constantly changing in order to stay up to user behavior changes and improvements in machine learning.
SEO is way too important for websites, blogs, product pages, e-commerce stores, or anything expecting users from the internet. As SEO is all about ranking. Now let’s see why you need SEO. The majority of search engine users -more than 70%(refer to the graph above)- are more likely to click one of the top 5 suggestions on the search engine results pages (SERPS). To take advantage of this behavior and gain visitors to your blog, your blog needs to appear in one of the top positions. And that is where SEO comes in as your savior.
SEO is not all about search engines; but also improves the user experience and usability of a website because the more users come to your blog, the more your blog’s usability and user experience increase as you tend to improve it more and more. Users trust search engines’ results. And your appearance in the first 10 search results gains the users’ trust in your blog.
In simple words, this is why SEO is important for blogs. In other words, we can simply say SEO FOR BLOGGING. But do not forget there is BLOGGING FOR SEO. Do not mix things. For your information, Blogging for SEO is organizations, and product owners are blogging in order to sell their products and services.
There are many SEO strategies that you can follow for your blog and we will talk about them in detail in an upcoming article.
At last…
Search Engine Optimization is an important part of your blogging journey. Choosing the right SEO strategies helps your blog to rank higher in search results that bring organic traffic to your blog. Understanding the importance of SEO and doing SEO in the right ways will bring you lots of organic traffic with time. If you have any questions or suggestions, please comment down below. Until then Happy Blogging!
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