SEO Tips & Tricks For Bloggers That Will Make You Rich

In this post I’m going to share with you some of my personal SEO tips & tricks that I’ve used to allow me to generate enough a full time income from the internet.

By optimising your blog so that it positions well in search engines you’ll be able to drive a consistenttruckload of traffic through to your site, and as you know more traffic = more money. Just a few small changes could send your posts rocketing right up to the top of the search.

Now forget all that backlinking nonsense, I’m going to show you the real way to get your posts found – just like you found this one!

Number 1 – Don’t create backlinks!

Seriously, don’t, ever.

People will tell you that backlinks are what’s needed to help your website rank – they tell Google that the page is important and by creating a load of backlinks to your page you’ll rocket up through the search engines. That’s not how it works.

Whilst it’s true, backlinks are important – you can’t manually create them. Well you can, but you’re just going to make things much much worse for your blog.

Google is clever, and no matter how much you think you can outsmart it, you can’t. Google will always win in the end. Backlinks might create a temporary victory, but it will only be that – temporary. Then you’ll be crying when you’re business disappears out of search overnight – it’s not worth it.

Let your visitors create the backlinks for you. Give them content that they want to link back to and that they want to share. If you crack that then you’ve set yourself up to make a lot of money on the internet. It’s much more worthwhile to take a couple of hours out to write an amazing post that will promote itself than it is to create a rubbish post that’s going to require constant promotion.

So with that in mind, we’ll move on to the next part…

Content.

When it comes to search engine marketing content is key.

A question many people ask is “how long do my blog posts need to be?”, the answer is simply “long enough”…

Long enough for what? Long enough to the give the user what it was they were looking for, but at the same time long enough to engage them in your website & make them want to check out what other posts you’ve written. Every post you write should be written in a way that it makes a user want to read another post, and you can do that with contextual links. For example, let me show you another post I wrote here whether or not you really can make money from blogging.

One thing to highlight is that you shouldn’t be focused on the length of the post, but instead you should be focused on the quality of the post. It’s much better to write 1 really high quality post a week than it is to write seven low quality ones. I actually came across a blog a couple of weeks back that had just 1 post yet it received over 20,000 hits a month because the post was so good – it was around 6,500 words which is a lot, but not THAT much. Probably would have taken around a day at most to put together, but 20k hits per month is more than worth it.

Images & videos are all great ways to break up a post and get the user more engaged. Plus videos are fantastic because it increases the time a visitor actually spends on your page which is highly favored by search engines – if they’re spending a while there then chances are the content’s probably good right?

On-site Optimisation.

Whilst writing great content is key, it’s no good if the search engine can’t “read” it properly. By setting up proper on-site optimisation you’ll enable search engines to basically get a better idea of what your page is all about. If you use WordPress then I highly recommend the Yoast SEO plugin which handles most of this for you, but basically this includes things like:

Creating META tags containing keywords (title/description)
Making sure your images have alt attributes attached (really important)
Making sure the topic is relevant to the keyword you’re aiming to rank for
Unique content
Static/clean URLs containing keywords
Fast loading
Headings (eg H1, H2 & H3) containing keywords

As I mentioned above if you are using WordPress then I’d highly recommend getting Yoast installed, especially if you’re a beginner to SEO because it basically gives you an “action plan” for each of your posts telling you how you can improve it’s SEO score.

It’s also worthwhile mentioning that you should only be targeting one specific keyword per post (unless they’re similar). Let’s say you want to rank for a few different terms, as opposed to trying to rank for all of these with 1 post it’s generally much easier to write multiple posts – but don’t do this if the keywords are very similar otherwise you could end up with a penalty for Google. Here’s what I mean…

If you want to rank for “how to lose weight” and “what are the best diet tips”, by all means create 2 posts because they’re 2 different things…

However if you want to rank for “how to lose weight” and “fast way to lose weight”, you want to try and target these within the same post because they’re pretty similar. For example you could call your post “How To Lose Weight Fast”.

Plus just like I’ve done above it’s great to break your content up with lists – everybody loves lists!

Getting your content out there.

Publishing great content is just half of the battle, well, in fact it’s probably about a third. Google determine the rankings of a website on over 200 factors and one of these is traffic, so the more popular your content appears generally the higher it’ll be ranked. The trouble is in order to get traffic you’ve got to first get it noticed, so how do you go about doing that?

Thankfully I’ve put together a guide on how you can quickly get your content noticed, in fact I’ve used those exact methods to go from 0 visitors to thousands in under a month. You should actually spend more time promoting your content than you did writing it, but then once it finally gets noticed then providing it really is quality it’ll begin to promote itself allowing you to then focus your efforts on another post.

Why I love search engines…

Search engines are fantastic because for a one time effort they give you life time traffic. For example I could write this blog post today and even if it only gets 1 visitor per day that’s 365 new visitors to my blog come the end of the day. Keeping that in mind if I was to publish 100 posts on my blog then that’d be a very nice 36,500 new people to my blog each year with no additional effort. They’re just going to keep coming & coming & coming. Plus the chances are that the older the post gets the more visitors it’s going to begin to get since it’ll have probably been shared quite a bit over the web.

That’s why search engines will make you rich!