Simple Blog SEO Tips To Increase Traffic

For years, I’ve been working on driving traffic to my blog.

I’ve studied several blogging SEO tips and taken a course or two. However, I never stuck with them because most were complicated and time consuming to maintain.

So, with semi-steady results, I continued to use processes that worked, even if they were slower to produce than those $500-to-$2,000 courses taught. Over the years, I’ve developed my own blogging SEO checklist, and that’s what I used until a few months ago, when I ran into someone online who helped me get even better results.

I think I first found Debbie Gartner in a Facebook group I belong to. She was talking about blog SEO and provided a link. Mostly self-taught, Debbie had grown her blog at an impressive rate and was sharing the blogging SEO processes she used on her own blog.

Of course, there are lots of ways to drive traffic to your blog other than with SEO, but search engine optimization delivers a steady stream of new traffic daily. That’s what most bloggers need in order to grow their followings.

So I checked my list against what she was teaching. Some of the steps I had developed were the same or very similar. But Debbie had some other clever additions that I’d never thought of. I wondered whether they would make a difference or not, so I gave them a try.

Why Follow A Non-Blog SEO Pro?

Why would I choose to follow advice from someone who was not a professional SEO? Because Debbie is getting results using steps that are easy to implement. These are things I (or my assistant) can do without a lot of fuss.

Most of the approaches I’ve seen for blogging SEO are complicated and long. And truthfully, I don’t have time for that. I needed something I could implement quickly to get results.

How did the process work?

Just the other day I was searching “printables verses print on demand” to send someone the link. I was shocked at what showed up! My blog post was in the highlighted Google answer box and the number 1 position.

printables verses print on demand

I decided to type in another search phrase (low-content publishing) and see what happened. Another post had hit the number 6 slot on the Google search engine results page (SERP).

printables seo

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This simple process was working to bring long-tail traffic to my site. I also found top 10 rankings for a number of other low-volume, long-tail keywords.

What defines a long-tail keyphrase? You’ll find various definitions online, but I define long-tail keywords as phrases that are made up of 3 or more words.

Long-tail keywords won’t produce as much volume as other keywords, but that means they also have less competition and are easier to rank for. And when you add up all the traffic from the long-tail keyphrases, it can total a lot of visits to your site.

While I’m happy to reveal the steps that I’ve been using for years, I can’t publish what I got from Debbie’s book. That would be illegal. 🙂 If you want to, you can pick up Debbie’s ebook called “Easy On-Page SEO: How to Write Blog Posts That Rank Well.”

Marketing Words’ Blog Post SEO Checklist

Choose 1 primary keyphrase and (depending on the length of your post) also choose 2 or 3 secondary keywords.
Insert your primary keyphrase into your blog post title using an H1 tag.
Enter the full keyphrase into the slug of the blog post URL using dashes to separate the words. (The slug is the portion of the page link after the .com.) For example: https://MarketingWords.com/enter-each-word-individually/
Add your primary keyphrase in the first paragraph. Include secondary keywords if you have room.
Include primary and/or secondary keyphrases in your sub-headlines using H2, H3, etc. tags. Whichever looks best.
Create a strong call-to-action and insert a keyphrase there using an H2 or other H tag.
Include links to other relevant posts on your blog.
Include ALT image tags with keyphrases that are descriptive of the photo/graphic.
Write a meta description tag that is engaging. You essentially want to create an ad for your post. The description will not help with search engine rankings, but it will help with clickthroughs.
Ask for comments / shares.

If you want more detail, I expand on this topic in this blog post.

This goes to show that you don’t have to follow some outlandishly complicated process in order to see results. All the traffic coming into a site through long-tail keyphrases can help you reach your goals faster than you thought possible.