How to be a successful blogger in just 4 easy steps

Starting a blog is a no-brainer. Anyone with a good grip on language and a little technical know-how of the current CMS can start a blog and even a website of their own within a couple of days. But what is it that tells a Search Engine Land from another teenager’s journal available to the public? More than good design and innovative ideas, we think, it has to do with marketing and search engine optimization.

Many of you are already heaving sighs of exasperation since “SEO is all about technicality and strategy”. That is where you are wrong. As of 2017 SEO has transcended the technicalities and HTML tags and entered into the domain of human language. Certain words and phrases act as the keywords that are preferred and sought after by search engines as per the users’ request.

SEO is now about the English language and definitely makes it a lot easier for the likes of us, who do not dare venture into the domain of technical, behind-the-scenes setups. So what are the various ways of dictating your blog’s SEO without donning your geek-glasses and going through pages of hieroglyph codes?

1. Amazing content –2017 is going to be all about content. Long-form content with no repetition is going to be big for SEO this year. As a matter of fact, if you keep archiving value adding content to your website everyday you will find it much easier to rank on popular search engine result lists even without doing anything extra. According to a publication by Hubspot, any websites publishing around 16 or more articles per month get about 3.5x more traffic then websites that publish only.
2. Redefining long-form content –when we say long-form we mean thesis-epic-“How I Met Your Mother”-kind long. If your content is too thin, it will fail to engage the crowd. You need to ensure that there is substance in the content. Your content should be at least 1500 words and if you can publish 1000 word “episodes” of a blog series then this can work wonders for your website traffic.
3. It’s all about optimization –if you hate SEO you will also have the very mention of “optimization” and we get that a lot! But we are not using this word to define any form of technical setup. The first step towards content optimization is identification of your main theme. Whenever you can, use a plug-in like Yoast and tools like Google Keyword Planner to read your crowd’s interest and behavior.
4. Promote – once you are confident about the content you have produced, publish it and share it through all possible channels on social media. Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Pinterest, and Twitter are wonderful instruments of social marketing and publicity. You can leverage their free publicity tools to skyrocket your blog’s popularity.

These are the 4 most important factors that you must remember while working on your personal SEO.