Blogs have become quite popular for putting your ideas, passion and important information out to the world and build your own community. The best part about a blog is that you can start it from ZERO initial investment and if your ideas become famous enough and you have good audience then you can even earn from your passion by posting ads on your blog by applying for AdSense or using Affiliate products to monetize your blog.
There are many free blogging platforms such as Blogger.com, WordPress.com and other (you can search on google). While many people know about simple things like how to create a blog, earning from a blog but underestimate what needs to be done next to grow further. There comes some important factors to grow & optimize your blog. Following questions can rise:
What is SEO?
Search Engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing a blog to appear on top of search engine search result on against specific keywords. As an internet marketing strategy, SEO process defines how the search results are shown when the user types a set of keywords. Blogs can be made SEO optimized for better performance, see full WordPress SEO package.
WordPress Blog SEO Optimizations
To make your blog rank higher in the search engine results you need good SEO. WordPress blog SEO requires you to follow some basic steps – see below.
There are some simple tricks that you can use for better SEO optimizations.
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Enable Search Engine Indexing
While you are working on your blog design, creating new pages and content until then you can enable “discourage search engines from indexing this site” option and once you are ready to launch your blog then you can change disable that option that will allow search engines to index your final posts and pages.
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Update Permalinks Structure
By default WordPress blogs use simple/default permalinks structure for posts and pages. Since this is not search engine friendly you must change your to structure to text based permanent structures.
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XML Sitemap
Installing a .XML sitemap plugin is very helpful for your blog as it helps to provide links to your pages on your blog to all the search engines which helps in SEO.
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Use WordPress Cache
You must use a caching speed plugin such as (W3 Total Cache) as it offers many features to increases the speed of your blog and decreases the load on your web server.
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Cloudflare CDN
A better option would be to use a CDN to boost up the website’s performance. We recommend CloudFlare – it’s free. It caches up the static content like text and JavaScript and spreads it on its distributed servers and then it serves it to your users through the servers which are closest to the them. This would speeds up the things and your static data can reach out to your viewers in seconds.
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WordPress SEO Plugin
Using WordPress SEO plugin is one of the most preferred methods for SEO optimization. Yoast SEO is the best wordpress SEO plugin.
It’s free version is just sufficient to get started. Make sure you use focus keywords and meta description for all blog posts and pages.
Conclusion
There are millions websites out there with way more content that you can’t even imagine about each niche. So in order your website to stand out, it needs to be different somehow. That’s a challenge for you to make it different for your users and to add some value.
When you think you have something different and it adds value to your readers. Then you need to find the right audience for it and that’s what you do with Search Engine Optimizations (SEO).