The following is a guest post from Dexter of infobunny.com, where he shares tips on blogging and social media. His latest post is about starting a blog in 2021.
If you want people to find your blog, you need great content backed up by knowledge in several key areas. In this post, I provide a simple guide to blog promotion to help new bloggers get started. I focus on the following 3 areas:
- On Page SEO
- Social Media
- Traffic Generation
In this post, I provide an overview of these important topics and a simple guide to blog promotion.
On Page SEO
On page SEO is the optimization of page content to help it rank in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for specific keywords.
However… SEO isn’t a silver bullet.
You don’t just learn about on page SEO and suddenly rank on page one in the SERPs… your content must be good too. Thin content will probably not rank high regardless of how well optimized your page content is.
Assuming your content is good, the following will help you with basic on-page SEO.
Create an SEO Friendly Post Title
Your title needs to be short and concise and should include target keywords.
Many SEO practitioners recommend placing your most desired keyword phrase near the beginning of your tile. According to the guys at Yoast, your title should be between 47 and 69 characters including spaces.
Anything over 69 characters will mean that your title will likely be cut off in the search results.
Furthermore, if your title is longer than 69 characters and you place your keyword phrase towards the end of it, your keywords won’t display as you’d like in the SERPs.
Headings and Sub-Headings
Headings and sub-headings give your blog post a structure. Use them to punctuate your content and highlight what is ahead. Add your keywords and keyword synonyms into your headings.
Images
Strong images draw readers in, especially when they offer instructions or useful information.
However, images can also help SEO. You can add a keyword-based description to all your images as well as an “alt tag“.
Internal and External Linking
Internally link to useful content you’ve already published as a way to move traffic around your blog. Don’t forget… internal links also help Google find and understand important related pages on your blog.
You should also link to authoritative pages on other sites as a way to qualify or provide proof of what you say. Building posts that don’t link out to other sites also looks unnatural.
However, try to avoid linking to a more authoritative site that’s targeting the exact same topic as your post. For example, linking from this post to an external page that’s also a guide to blog promotion may hinder your chances of ranking for keyword phrases people will be making to find an your post.
Instead, try to link to a page that adds more detail to one aspect that’s covered in your guide: in this post for example it might be optimizing images. This allows the reader to dig deeper into a area that you may not have covered in as much depth but that isn’t competing directly with your post.
Find out more about internal and external links.
Social Media
Social media is about as instant as site traffic gets: share your content to your social channels frequently.
Follow up on any engagement you receive, this will help you build new followers and further help build social media traffic.
Medium
Medium is a great blogging site that can help you grow traffic. You can build yourself a branded account or set up a publication to work alongside your blog.
Write unique content or share summaries of existing posts. You can even import existing posts: Medium adds a canonical link automatically.
If you build up a good reputation on Medium, it’s possible to submit your posts to popular publications that have thousands of followers. This will help to get eyes on your Medium posts and may result in growing visitors to your blog.
Quora
Quora is great for generating blog post ideas. However, the it can also be an impressive traffic generation tool when used correctly.
Look for questions around a topic you’ve written about and then provide an informative answer to it, adding a subtle link to your more detailed post.
If your answer is considered authoritative, you’ll may get a traffic boost, especially if the original question ranks well on search.
The key Quora is to provide detailed and high quality answers.
People love visual content and that’s why Pinterest can be a really valuable traffic source. Include a portrait image at the end of your posts and share it to relevant boards.
Summary
Traffic is the result of every action you take: from content creation to promoting that content.
A solid and consistent approach to SEO will result in traffic from search engines… but this won’t happen overnight.
Having a strong Social Media presence helps build organic traffic to your content.
SEO and Social media are some of the ways to encourage traffic growth… but remember this only works if your produce high quality authoritative content.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on blog promotion. Please leave a comment or ask a question below.
