The Complete Beginners Guide for Effective Blogging | Part 4

As promised in part 3 in this blogging guide for effective blogging I will be covering the topic of SEO – Search Engine Optimisation.

SEO has attracted a lot of bad behavior over the years, with many content producers trying to leverage effective SEO before producing good content.

As this is a beginners course let’s start off with a definition:

S.E.O. stands for Search Engine Optimisation.

Simply put, this is how search engines categorize, rank, and allow the global world of internet users to search for your content through organic searches.

The Complete Beginners Guide for Effective Blogging

The most popular search engine in the world today is Google. Other search engines are Bing and Yahoo. There are many others, but the ones mentioned are generally household names.

SEO encourages us as content producers to focus our content and keywords and keyphases or long tail keywords.

Let’s look at examples by taking articles I have published:

The Road to Launch my First YouTube ad – The Complete Series

The Keyword here is YouTube.

However a long tail keyword is Launch my First YouTube ad

For 99% of bloggers, we play the SEO game of utilising long tail keywords.

Simple Keywords are Pointless

Keywords by themselves are usually beyond our ability to compete on and are often monopolized by large or well-established businesses.

Trying to rank on the first page of Google by competing on the word YouTube is a waste of my time, however, if I compete with a longer phases such as “Launch my First YouTube ad”, I then stand a chance.

While it’s still competitive, I now have some sort of chance of ranking on Google and therefore increase the likelihood of organic traffic getting to my website through Google search.

Robots and Humans

While manipulating your content for SEO may seem a bit contrived and robotic, it does in fact focus your content. This is not only good for computer systems it’s good for humans as well.

People do scan for key phases to establish whether the content is suitable for them or not. It is a terrific way of telling people exactly what your content is about with the least amount of information.

This method aligns your content with relevant readers which is what you want.

The Exceptions in Blogging

There are exceptions as I discussed in Part 1 of this guide. There are people out there who can produce content with obscure headlines and basically ignore all SEO techniques.

These exceptions are often coming from people with incredible reputations, that have amassed a colossal loyal following for reasons that probably have nothing to do with producing content online.

Exceptions of course exist but they are not there to be followed because the success cannot be emulated following the same methods.

A blogger that carries out exception after exception is Seth of Seth’s Blog. He produces some of the most incompetent headlines on the internet.

Examples of his headlines include:

• Beyond a shadow
• “The way we’ve always done it”
• What’s your game?

What the hell is he talking about?

Unless you know Seth’s work you would not have a clue, but he’s cultivated a massive readership and because of that, he gets away with breaking the rules.

It’s very unlikely you will. But if you believe you will get away with it, by all means go ahead and go for it. Maybe your next headline can be:

Been there done that – or something else obscure and clueless like that. Seth’s probably going to steel that one now. I’m watching you Seth!

Playing the Long Game

SEO is playing the long game and the more focused and niche-specific you can get the more you stand a chance of being successful.

The one plugin you must get for your blog is Yoast SEO.

This is by far one of the best plugins you can get for composing blog articles.

It guides you in both your use of SEO and in the readability of the article.

Having your articles Yoast ready will give you an immediate boost in both the quality of the content and the quality of the SEO.

It’s a free WordPress plugin that you can install and use straight away.

It’s not to be missed. It will inform you precisely on what you have to do to improve the article and will tell you once you have achieved optimum optimisation of your content.

Yoast SEO is the single best plugin for bloggers.

If there is one thing I would want you to get out of the entire blogging for beginners series it would be to download and utilize Yoast SEO.

Here’s the summary:

• SEO determines how you rank on search engines
• Your best strategy is long-tail keywords
• YOAST SEO is the best plugin you can get to help you

This is the final part in the The Complete Beginners Guide for Effective Blogging series.

I hope you enjoyed it and got something out of it.

We all have our own style and that’s wonderful, but we must not ignore the fundamentals when producing blogging content because without a good foundation it really doesn’t matter how good your style is.