Search engines are continually changing, and keyword stuffing and backlinking to dead-end sites is no longer a good strategy for directing quality traffic to your website.

Most of my blog traffic starts with a search engine, so I am always making improvements to my site and content to be sure that I am appealing to new search engine algorithms, thus being able to reach quality readers. Blogs offer the full gamut of mixed media SEO building tools that any good site needs!

When I first started this blog, I constantly asking, “How do I get my blog to rank higher on Google?”

In today’s post, I will share how I’ve created SEO-friendly blog posts that have helped me rank #1 or at least on the first page of Google several times.

My 10 Easy Ways to Improve Your Blog’s Google Ranking are easy to follow and start implementing today. 

 

1) Quality

Having a good mixture of evergreen and new content that people want to see will keep people on your site and keep them coming back.

Key Word there, you want to “keep” people. Give them what they want, give them evergreen content that they will want to bookmark for later use. Give them new content that they can look forward to reading.

For example, if you run a website on interior design, keep your home page fresh with new photos of the latest trends. You can also post style guides to guide people when it comes to common color schemes or installations. These tactics can be used with websites that cover almost anything, use them, and watch your SEO rating increase.

 

2) Site Load Speed

This concept is simple if your page takes too long to load, a user is going to hit the back button and look for a site that will load faster. When users spend such little time “on” a page, it will hurt the website owners’ SEO ranking. Make sure that your host and web designer make loading speed a top priority for you.

Tip: I check my site speed and health on UberSuggest within Neil Patel’s site! His free tools have helped me improve the overall health of the House Fur website.

 

3) Optimized Images

Large, clunky images can slow down your loading speed and make your page laggy. This will deter people from wanting to further purse content on any of your websites since it is an inconvenience for them to have to wait.

Make sure your images are compact and named strategically. I use BlogStomp.

 

4) Break Up Your Content

Everyone loves easy to ingest and digest content! If you go to a website and you only see a daunting block of endless text – you probably won’t stick around long enough to read any of it.

Give them the choice to scan and then to dive in where they wish. Use H2 headers for each section and short paragraphs to describe each header.

Lists, bullet points, and photos are also a great way to break up your walls of text!

5) Short & Smart Post URLs

It should come as no surprise that the more natural a URL is to read for humans, the better it is for search engines. Accessibility has always been a part of SEO, but never more so than today when engines can leverage advanced user and usage data signals to determine what people are engaging with vs. not.

It’s still the case that using the keywords, you’re targeting for rankings in your URLs. And, keywords in the URL show up in search results, and research has shown that the URL is one of the most prominent elements searchers and search consoles consider when selecting which site to click and rank.

 

6) Internal Linking

Use a variety of internal and outbound links in your text of every blog post. Internal links will bring viewers to other pages so they may be interested in content there. External links to reputable, relative, recent sources will increase your credibility and overall SEO rating.

I use a plugin on WordPress called Link Whisper.  Link Whisper is a revolutionary WordPress Plugin to Speed Up the Process of Internal Linking and Help You Rank Better in Google. I installed it about four months ago, and I have been internally linking to all of my blog posts like crazy! My blog visitors have spent about 45% more time on my blog because they can keep clicking around to other relevant posts within my blog.

 

7) Readability

You want a range of reading levels to be able to read your website without talking down to them, and you want to make sure your writing makes sense, and it’s peppered with grammatical errors.

I use Grammarly to make my editing faster, and my writing overall better. I love that it works fluidly within WordPress, twitter, Gmail, Facebook, and most apps!

 

8) Must Be Mobile Friendly

Statistica reported that 64% of web searches were done with mobile devices n 2018.

Enough said, make sure your blog is viewable by mobile devices, or you are missing out on more than 50% of web search traffic.

 

9) Keyword Research & Placement

I use UberSuggest to help me find the best keywords for my blog topic, what other websites are already ranking for this specific topic, and how popular of a topic it is. If it isn’t being searched a lot, then it probably won’t get traffic. If it has a fair amount of searches but there aren’t any incredible articles about it, this is a perfect opportunity fo,r you to jump in and get on it! Write a better, more researched, more entertaining, more exciting version! Make sure to use the keywords you want to rank for within the first 100-125 words of your post.

 

10) Contact Information and Purchasing

Make it easy for people to contact you and make purchases. If people are forced to make more than a few clicks to do either they are not likely to follow through. They will leave your site and never look back. Keep it simple, as they say!

I hope that these tips help you to get on your way to ranking higher on Google. A higher Google ranking will ensure that your page gets more traffic and more traffic equals more profit and more adoring readers!

Now! Get to work with these 10 simple suggestions today!