Most people spend too must time developing contents; this is great since I am a big fan of “pro-content” as against over-optimization of blog posts.
How frustrating would it be if after all the time invested in creating those lovely contents, you still fail to implement some of the smartest tips that will ultimately make your blog posts friendly to both humans and bots? Certainly, your goal should not be spending more time on a post; your goal should be making those lovely quality articles known to humans and bots.
I am not a pro-blogger, just a fervid one and I won’t try to throw irreverent things to prove how wrong you are writing that next article, just like most pro-bloggers (coughs..) do, to prove how superior they are. I am not perfect and I have also been plain lazy.
So let’s kick off..
Don’t Be Shy, Let The World Know Your New Post
Why did I ask you not to be shy? Well, it’s because I was shy when I started blogging on this blog. I was relying on only organic traffic which is great, but I realized, I had very ridiculous social presence. It was a war within, and I couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to share my articles. After 6-months, I decided I was going to stop being shy and start sharing.
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Joined a couple of Facebook groups relevant to my blog’s niche and started hitting the share button. Tweeting, stumbling and digging. Over time, I made a good number of fantastic blogging friends. The good news? Social presence for my blog increased, though not by 100% but still fair enough.
The point is this; you should share your blog posts to top social bookmarking sites and reach out to more people.
Don’t Forget Your ALT Tags
When I said earlier that I was lazy, this next tip should give you a clear idea of what I meant.
Do you know Google has index-able images which are seen on Google’s image repository? In the case you are unaware, I am glad you know that now. The ALT tags you must insert on every image in your blog posts are what Google use in adding images to their “Image Search”. If you are lazy as I was then, you could be missing out from a good source of traffic.
The best practice is to use keywords and separate each keyword with a hyphen(-).
Insert The Right Categories And Tags
This is specifically for bloggers using WordPress CMS. After creating that lovely article, you should add only relevant categories to the article. I usually use at most 3 categories per post. That makes your blog articles easy to navigate by humans.
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For tags, most SEO plugins have a way dramatically changing your tags to “keywords” for your article. So in this case, your tags should be contain only keywords relevant to your articles. There was a general misconception of how keywords are interpreted by search engines but I can say that Google gives less attention to article keywords because many bloggers where notoriously known for practicing black hat SEO, adding as much as 10-15 tags per article. I wouldn’t advice anything more than 5-tags per article.
For bloggers running Blogger framework, Categories and Labels work exactly the same. Your labels should reflect your article and aid navigation.
Make Use of Newsletters
Every Sundays, I have my weekly newsletters sent out to my lovely subscribers. Sending newsletters is not one of the best things I love doing online, but it isn’t anywhere near what I hate doing most.
I didn’t like the daily feed delivered to subscribers on their mail box. My own reservation was that I was spamming the inbox on my subscribers; I am certain a lot of them found it really embarrassing, so I decided to end the automated newsletter by FeedBurner and adopted MailChimp on my blog. Every weekends, I spend hours creating newsletters containing most of my blog posts for the week, including teasers.
It makes a lot of sense, since you can control what you want to be in the newsletter. You should send your blog posts to your subscribers; some could have subscribed to your blog but not yet an active reader. Sending newsletters is a great method of re-echoing your blog to their mind and it’s certainly not too much of a work to do. It does bring engagement and conversion. That’s the selling point.
Comment On Other Blogs
Don’t just sit in isolation waiting for your blog posts to go viral. You must build relationship by commenting on other blogs. Many bloggers have different reasons for commenting on other blogs and one of the most popular reasons is getting backlinks from CommentLuv enabled blogs. This has greatly been abused by some bloggers who drop irreverent comments just for the link juice.
Your greatest error would be to adopt that same philosophy; rather you should be focused on establishing relationship with top bloggers by dropping thought-provoking comments on their blogs. The proud ones won’t reciprocate immediately, but later, they will begin to notice you.
Over To You
I have written so much, and I sincerely hope you have learned something already. Let me hear your thoughts on this one. 🙂
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2 Comments
Ebenezer Obasi
Good one Nosa. I was a bit surprise the first time I saw your post on your Facebook timeline. I’m glad you finally realize how much your FB friends love to see your updates.
Nosa E Nosa
Hahaha.. I am glad you noticed, I took a professional advice from a friend. I just didn’t want to “spam” my friends, but I guess that was a genuine thought. I still do everything in modesty and thanks for your warm comment buddy..