What to Consider for SEO-Friendly Blog Posts
SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” In simple terms, it means improving your site’s visibility to relevant searches. The more visible you make your site, the more likely you will attract possible customers or readers to your site. There are over 200 different ways search engines rank the order of websites called “ranking factors.” Below we will talk about just a few of the most important factors.
Domain Authority
You can build your domain’s authority over time by getting more quality clicks and providing high-quality content. This is where referring domains will come in handy while trying to build your blog’s domain authority.
Referring Domains
These are other websites your blog may be linked to, such as your business’s website or even featured on a different website. When your blog is linked to higher authority websites, it will be more likely for your blog to gain authority and be ranked higher on search engines such as Google.
Domain Relevance
Domain relevance means that the topic of your blog should be relevant to your main point. For example, if your blog is about jewelry, it will be easier for you to rank in jewelry-related topics. However, if you start to post blogs about being vegan, it will be much more difficult to rank. If you have another topic you want to blog about, give it its own platform.
Mobile Use
The site your blog is on must be compatible with other devices such as tablets or iPhones. This improves the load time of your blog and overall user experience to help you rank higher on search engines.
Dwell Time
Dwell time refers to how long someone stays on your blog. Say you are ranked number five on the first page of their search, and someone clicks onto your blog. They enjoy the content and click around your site; this is dwell time. Dwell time also incudes when they leave your site while still visiting other pages. Google or other search engines will take note of this and bump you up a rank or two, as that means your content is satisfying readers and giving them the information they are looking for.
Organic Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
Your site CTR is how often your page clicks on after searching a keyword. A high CTR will keep your blog page steady at its initial rank or can even move you up a rank. If you are ranked towards the bottom of the first page of results and seem to be getting more click-throughs than the higher-ranked pages, the search engines will definitely notice because that means the pages they have ranked higher aren’t meeting the needs of the people searching.
Content Quality
Content quality is pretty self-explanatory. The better the content you are creating, the higher you will rank in searches! When thinking of quality content, keep domain relevance in mind and how this will also affect dwell time. While this may seem trivial to mention, this is the foundation of SEO for bloggers.
As you can now see just from these seven out of over two hundred ranking factors, a lot goes into a site’s SEO. Trying to make your blog as SEO-friendly as possible may seem a little daunting at first, with all this new lingo to keep in mind and getting a good ranking. That said, once you understand rankings and how search engine optimization works, it will all be worth it!