Should I Be Concerned About SEO on My Blog?
Many new bloggers find the concept of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to be a foreign language. It seems to be too big of a subject to tackle.
“I just want to blog and have people show up” is what I often hear from bloggers.
Over the last few months there has been a significant increase in people preying on unsuspecting beginner bloggers (in my opinion). If you haven’t received the following email yet, you will:
“Hi I was checking out your website, you have an awesome website, but I see your not ranking well on Google, which means customers cant find your website!, I can fix this for you, I can get you better rankings and a ton more traffic to your website, Fast! If your interested please let me know.”
I have received this message at least 3 or 4 times in the past 2 weeks and all from different people. My wife recently received this message and was wondering if it was legitimate. I have also been asked the same question from other bloggers as well.
4 Guidelines for Handling SEO on Your Blog
We are all for SEO. In fact, the majority of my traffic for all of my blogs still comes from SEO, but you need to educate yourself on the basics. Here are just a few guidelines to help you:
1. Be very careful about outsourcing your SEO
I am all for outsourcing, but if there is one area I am leery of it is in outsourcing my SEO. There are many tricks of the trade that can produce artificial results only to have you come crashing down when Google penalizes your site.
Be careful about giving permission to others to do what they want in promoting your blog in any way. We have seen some large companies get penalized by Google because they outsourced their SEO to someone.
2. Write to your readers first and foremost
It is easy to get so wrapped up in SEO that your article doesn’t make much sense to the end user. Keyword stuffing your article so you can get every kind of variation in the article will hurt you with your readers. If you want more keywords, you need to add way more content.
3. Adopt some simple SEO practices where possible
We go into depth on how to benefit from SEO in our Blogging Your Passion University 201 and 301 course. We share with you what is important and what you need not to worry about. In fact, here is a PDF we share in our BYPU 201 course called the 9 Point SEO Checklist for Blog Posts PDF.
I’d encourage you to print this off and use it as a guide when writing or editing your blog posts.
4. You can always go back and improve your SEO
I also really enjoy working on SEO later. In other words, take your top 20 posts that get the most search engine traffic and go back and improve the SEO on those pages. We get into way more specifics in the 301 course, but some still techniques would be to add new keywords, add ALT text to images, add more internal links to your top 20 posts, etc.
Question: Have you received unsolicited offers to outsource your SEO?
