Have you recently started a blog but started to notice you aren’t getting the traffic you wanted? Are you not getting the traffic you want? Today we’re going to take a look at 7 easy ways to improve your SEO right off the bat!
Submit Your Site to Google, Bing, and Yahoo
I’m sure this one sounds funny, but people still don’t do this. So take a few minutes and add your site to Google, Bing, and Yahoo. You’ll do yourself a favor by adding to these. I’ll wait while you go add your site.
Setup Your Permalinks
In most cases this is setup, but if you have a url like this, http://example.com/?p=234, you are bad! Please go change your permalinks to ANYTHING but the default! You’ll website will thank you!
Add Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the defacto analytics tool people use for tracking their traffic to their website. How do you know where you are getting traffic from or where to start targeting to get traffic from without having some evidence to back it up. Go get Google Analytics and add it to your site now!
Install Google XML Sitemaps
Some people may think this is one of those no-brainer installs, but I’ve seen countless times where people do not have some sort of XML sitemap for their site. Google XML Sitemaps, is a perfect plugin! It is one of those plugins that does a specific task, creating a XML sitemap of your site. It will generate as you add content. The best part of it is that it notifies ALL the major search engines you have got new content on your site!
Install a SEO Plugin
Alright, I’m torn on this one a little bit. There’s two very good SEO plugins out there (besides some themes that include SEO built in) that people trust to use, All in One SEO Pack, and WordPress SEO by Yoast. Both plugins do a really great job at helping you improve your SEO. For the most part they go hand in hand on the feature request. I’ve installed both plugins on client sites, but unfortunately I have not determined which one is the best. The good news is that you can play with these and figure out which one you like the best and use the SEO Data Transporter plugin to move the SEO data around between the two plugins. If you have to ask though, I’ve installed WordPress SEO by Yoast more times than All in One SEO.
Write Awesome Quality Content
The more you write, the better you will be at it. The better content you have for your site, the better organic search you’ll get for your site. Create a schedule, set aside time, do something to force yourself to create content, quality content, for your site. I’m guilty of it just as much as the next person. I’m setting aside a few hours a week to pump out content on few topics I want to talk about.
Leave Comments on Sites
We all read blogs or other websites. Take time to leave a worthwhile comment on someone’s site. And take the time to include a link to a blog post you have written that helps the opinion, position, etc. of the blog post you’re leaving the comment on.
While these all effect your SEO differently, they are easy to get started with. I’m sure some people will argue with me about some of these (I won’t point out just yet) being included on this list, but it has been proven that these tactics are easy to get started with and will improve your SEO.
So what are you not doing on this list that you could improve on?
