Do you want Higher Google Rankings? Do you want to skyrocket your website traffic? You've come to the right place.
This is by far the most detailed SEO for Bloggers guide, that teaches How to SEO a blog in 2021, from scratch.
This is the exact blueprint that I've used in building websites and doing SEO for my clients, for over 14 years.
Each and every point mentioned in this post have its own impact. If you're a blogger starting out and don't know what to do, this SEO Tutorial will guide you home.
Firstly, let's just brief out SEO.
What is SEO?
What is SEO? SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the practice of optimizing the website, so that is gets discovered via search engine's organic search results. This increases the quality and quantity of traffic, without having to pay for the ads.
If you follow every point in this tutorial, you'll see results a lot faster than you imagined.
How to SEO a Blog from Scratch
Every blogger wishes to go from 0 to 1 Million visitors per month, as fast as possible.
That's where SEO comes into play.
It's the ultimate, evergreen, and the most important factor to get you to receive that 1 Million traffic.
If you haven't already got your website ready, you can check out my post How to Start a Blog.
So, without further ado, let's get straight into the SEO for Bloggers process, from scratch.
Install Required Tools & Plugins
Google Search Console
The Google Search Console is a free, super powerful SEO tool. It offers tools and reports for the following actions:
- Confirm that Google can find and crawl your site.
- Fix indexing problems and request re-indexing of new or updated content.
- How often your site appears in Google Search
- Which searches queries show your site
- How often searchers click through for those queries and more.
- Receive alerts when Google encounters indexing, spam, or other issues on your site.
- Show you which sites link to your website.
- Troubleshoot issues for AMP, mobile usability, and other search features.
The data it shows comes straight from Google. You know it's right! If you're serious about SEO, it's a path that definitely can't be missed.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free marketing analytics tool from Google that lets you get a deeper understanding of your website visitors.
Google Analytics lets you:
- Check the Unique Visitors, Sessions, Pageviews for various time intervals
- See the traffic you get from various sources like Organic Search, Direct, Referral, Social, Affiliates, and many more.
- Check the pages on your website that bring you the most traffic or least traffic.
- Check the trends in website traffic.
This is just the beginners stuff. There's a LOT to learn about Google Analytics.
According to a source, Google Analytics helped an art marketplace, resulting in 400% year-over-year revenue growth for the business!
If you wish to learn about Google Analytics (which you must), check out Google's free official Analytics Academy Courses.
Rankmath SEO Plugin
Rank Math WordPress SEO plugin will help you rank higher in search engines. Once Rank Math is installed, it automatically brings up the setup wizard.
If you've come across people that tell you to install Yoast SEO, you're in for a treat. It's time to ditch Yoast SEO for the new plugin in the market: Rankmath SEO.
Features of Rank Math Free SEO Plugin:
- Include a separate SEO title for Google snippets and automatically insert it into your HTML.
- Optimize your meta descriptions.
- Automatically insert meta descriptions into the HTML of the post or page without you having to do so yourself.
- Keep your sitemap up to date, thereby ensuring that ALL your content is indexed by search engines.
- Ping the search engines when you publish or update a post or page.
- Lightweight, bloat-free, and low on CPU resources.
- Built-in Rich Snippets.
- 1-Click SEO audit.
- Integrates Google keyword suggestions.
- Optimize up to 5 keywords.
- Link suggestions.
- Fallback meta-data insertion.
- Redirection Manager.
- 24×7 free support.
It also manages the Technical SEO part, like robots.txt, sitemaps etc.
Don't think much, it's free of cost! Download and Install the Rankmath SEO Plugin for your WordPress blog.
Grammarly: Extension for Chrome
Grammarly is a writing assistant that goes deeper than grammar to offer you comprehensive writing feedback. It helps bloggers avoid embarrassing grammatical errors and typing errors.
Compose bold, clear, mistake-free writing with Grammarly’s AI-powered writing assistant.
Grammarly is a must-have tool for bloggers. It covers all the aspects of writing at a professional level. Even the world's best writers make silly mistakes!
You don't wanna lose potential customers due to something as minute as Grammar now, do you?
Keyword Research
Keyword Research is a market research process that discovers potential keywords related to your business that users search for.
It is a crucial part of SEO without which, you're just shooting arrows in the dark.
- You can't write a solid piece of content without knowing what people will search for.
- You can't optimize your page with keywords without knowing what keywords to optimize for.
Also, I recommend a 100% Free Keyword Research Course by industry leader – SEMrush.
This course will help you if you're learning how to do keyword research or just brushing up on certain aspects. Upon course completion, you’ll be able to conduct solid keyword research on your own.
- Find rankable content ideas in your niche
- Find Long-Tail Variations using “Google Suggest”
- Get keyword ideas using free “Ahrefs Keyword Generator”
- Optimize content for Generated Keywords
- Make the content Easy-to-Read
- Include LSI keywords in your content
Step 4: Proofread & Publish the blog post
Step 5: Fix Technical WordPress & SEO Errors
Step 6: Promote the blog post on social media
Step 7: Build links for your blog post
Writing a 300-word content and expecting to get quality rankings in the search results is a big old NO. Things have changed since 2007, Google is getting smarter than ever.
It might sound confusing or complex to some, but trust me, it's not.
If you wish to rank higher, you need the authority, you need that DA (Domain Authority). To gain DA, you need Backlinks from authority websites.
Rather than focusing totally on writing that content, the focus should be solely on build do-follow backlinks for your website.
What is a Backlink?
A Backlink, also known as an “inbound link” or “incoming link”, is a link created when one website links to another. Search engines like Google use backlinks to discover and rank content from different websites, on their search results.
Backlinks play a crucial role in most search engine algorithms and ranking your content higher in the search results. The page/post with the highest number of backlinks tends to appear higher in the organic search results list.
