If you approach blogging with the intent of getting traffic to your main website, then you’re at least loosely familiar with the idea of search engine optimization. But what you may not know is that internal SEO practices are becoming more and more important, almost on a monthly basis. Because so much information is competing for the same search space, you have to be more specific than ever in creating good keyword combinations.
If you’ve noticed a drop in your blogging traffic lately, some good places to start reinvesting in the SEO process would be to go over topics like what SEO is in the first place, how you can judge its value, why you want to approach it from a reverse engineering perspective, why it acts as a gatekeeper, and then how to experiment to get better results.
What Is SEO?
Before you can approach search engine optimization on a personal blogging level, you have to know what it is. And this doesn’t mean that you can rely on what SEO writing used to be. Because the rules change over time, you have to know what SEO means now. The way keywords and density and sentence structure and placement is value can change rapidly with each new iteration of Google’s algorithm.
How Can You Judge It?
It can be difficult to determine SEO value on your own, which is why it’s good to install Yoast SEO plugins or something similar to help you out. These plugins (that work well inside WordPress system) read your blog post content and framework and give you hints about what will and won’t work with regard to focus keywords and general organization. This information is both invaluable, and free! Use it to your advantage.
The Idea of Reverse Engineering
And even if it seems a bit awkward at first, if you approach your blog posts as a way of reverse engineering attention, it will be to your benefit. If you understand how people search for topics, and then adjust your writing style at least partially to fit with that concept, you’ll get the traffic going no problem.
SEO Is the New Content Gatekeeper
It’s important to understand the SEO is now the new information and content gatekeeper. If you don’t understand the basic principles, it won’t matter how good your blog is – no one will be able to find it. So make sure your priorities are straight!
Experiment To Determine Applicability
And one great thing about different types of SEO writing and techniques is that you can do some experimentation on a week-to-week basis. Adjust a few of your basic parameters every time you make a new post, and see which ones will eventually get the results you want.