7 Quick Blogging Tips – How to Power Up Your Traffic

If you are struggling to get results with your blog then you’ll love these 7 Quick Blogging Tips.

I’ll walk you through 7 ways you can quickly and easily get results on your blog. This post is also super useful if you are getting traffic but want to boost it!  

When I started blogging in 2011 I had NO idea what I was doing.

I wrote about a whole bunch of stuff and it was only later that I focused my blog to be about what my readers (and I) were most interested in: visual social media and content strategy.

I eventually (after a lot of trial and error) started to pay attention to SEO and other ways to optimize by blog.

I wish I had started earlier.

BUT don’t panic if you think you are doing it wrong too.

My blog still won awards, has driven great traffic, has helped me to build an amazing business…without knowing much about all that other “SEO stuff” to begin with.

And I learned that it is NEVER too late to make tweaks and changes on your blog to get bigger results.

So let’s jump in to 7 Quick Blogging Tips you can do TODAY to get more traffic and results on your blog.

7 Quick Blogging Tips

#1  Get Help from Yoast

When it comes to SEO it can be tricky and can take a while to learn the best way to optimize your content.

One of the best tools that I’ve found for helping to get a handle on SEO (if you are WordPress user) is Yoast SEO for WordPress Plugin

Even at it’s most basic, Yoast can help your blog to get more traffic.

It works on a “traffic light” system in that each paramater for SEO is ranked according to green, amber or red.

Let’s use the example below to show you how it works.  I took a screenshot of my Yoast results after just starting to write this post.

Obviously I have not optimized everything t the start of writing this post but it will give you an idea of how Yoast works.

You can see that Yoast highlighted a few key things I can do with SEO to improve this post (all in red). These include:

1. Adding some images with alt text descriptions.
2. Adding a focus keyword or phrase
3. Adding a meta-description.

But even as I start to write the post, Yoast is tracking my word length, whether or enough I have some outbound and inbound links and more:

And when I have finished the post, you can see that Yoast is happier, with more green lights!

I now have chosen a keyword phrase, I have included this phrase a few times in my post (in a way that occurs naturally), and my images are in place and optimized.

I could go on and on but this post is not an SEO lecture. This is about quick and easy ways to optimize your blog for better traffic.

If you do just one of the quick blogging tips that the Yoast Plugin suggests for you, it will improve your SEO and potentially your traffic.

And besides, it’s fun making the red dots turn to green!

Of all the quick blogging Tips, this is perhaps the most important to help you get basic SEO sorted.

Good SEO = Good Organic Traffic.

2   Choose a better title for your post

There’s one thing about headlines. They can often be made better (and there are some great tools to help you do it!).

One of my favourite headline tools is CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer. Check it out here.

This tool helps you to get more mileage (read:  traffic) out of your headline by making it more eye-catching and appealing.

Enter your headline and you will be given rankings for:

1. structure, grammar and readablity of the headline you submit
2. a breakdown of the common, uncommon, emotional and power words used in your headline. To find out more about these, check out CoSchedule’s post here.
3. bonus points for certain types of posts (for example this post is a List Post).
4. ideal character and word count for your headline (the tool will tell you if your heading is too long/short for your blog and for email headlines)

You’ll get an overall score and rankings. Then you can tweak your headline to improve it.

HOT TIP:  the tool will keep your previous headline results so then you can go back and pick the best result and use it!

3  Add Shareable Featured Images

This one is a no brainer – always add a shareable image that works across at least one of your key social media platforms.

For me, on this blog, it’s a landscape image. I use landscape as it looks good at the top of the post but it also shares well to Facebook and Twitter.

I add this image as my “preferred image” in the Yoast SEO Plugin as well.  There’s a social media section on the plug-in that allows you to choose the featured image you want to be shown when someone shares to Facebook or Twitter.

Another tool you can use for this is Social Warfare.

You can read about both plugins in this post, including how each plugin works.

HOT TIP:  Square and Landscape featured images are great sizes for working across more than one platform.  For example landscape shares well to Facebook and Twitter and Square shares well to Facebook and Instagram.

I also include a portrait sized image for the “pinners” out there who want to pin my image to PInterest.  I usually add the image directly to my post like on this post, and I also often add it through Social Warfare plugin. Social Warfare has a special feature where you elect to show a pinterest-ready image without having it show publicly on your post. It sits in the background ready to get shared.

4  Review Your Highest Traffic Posts

This is a huge eye-opener and can give you many ways to increase traffic.

Here are a few things that I am starting to do with high-traffic posts. You should do this too:

• Make sure you have Google Analytics installed and check it regularly to see what posts are sending you the most traffic.
• Look Carefully at the most popular posts (sometimes it might surprise you as to which post is actually doing well).  How can you improve those posts? Can you add more shareable images? Can you make them more evergreen? Do the stats or references need updating?
• Add a Content Upgrade to the posts that are doing well already so you can capture more leads/subscribers.  See #5.
• Turn these posts into a series of posts – Now that you know your readers love this topic/content,  create more posts about the same topic and linke between the posts. This way you can keep them on your site for longer.

 

5  Add a Content Upgrade

When you find a popular post, add a content upgrade – either a cheatsheet or free download or checklist related to that particular blog post content. Visitors to your site then have the option to get “more” value from you.

Make sure that you provide more value (and wow them) after they subscribe.

HOT TIP –  As mentioned in #4 – make sure you add these to your popular posts to help organic traffic to transition into subscribers.

6  Alt Your Images

This is often a mistake that most bloggers make and can increase your good standing with Google if you fix it – add alt text to your images.

Why does Google love Allternative (or Alt) text on images? Alt Text provides a text alternative for an image. The text is displayed instead of an image, say in email or if the browser does not display images.

Google loves Alt Text because it tells Google what the picture is about and also improves accessibility of your website.

WordPress (the platform I use) allows you to easily add these in the Media Library when you add each image – just add the text that you want to appear for your Alternative Text, as follows:

7  Check Broken Links

I took waaaaay too long to do this but now I am starting to do this regularly.

There are many tools that allow you to do this but I use a tool called SEM Rush.

SEM Rush will show you your broken internal links (links to my own blog – oops) as well as external links (links out to other websites) that are broken, and for the most part they are easy to fix.

You can also set up reports so that you are reminded weekly to check in on any errors or new problems that show up.

If you don’t know that problems exist on your blog, you can’t fix them!  So, it’s worth adding this to a regular “cleanup” and audit of your blog.

And besides, Google likes links that work… so it’s better to keep Google happy and keep your links healthy.

Find them, fix them or replace them!

HOT TIP:   SEM Rush does a LOT more than find broken backlinks including keyword analytics, tracking your traffic, brand monitoring and backlinks.  It’s a beast of a tool and their team is super helpful, so if you are getting serious about blogging, check it out.

Ready to use these quick blogging tips?

Are you ready to boost the traffic to your site with these 7 Quick Blogging Tips?  

What will you try first (or if you have a quick tip to share, leave it in the comments below!).