15 Quick and Easy SEO Tips for Beginner Bloggers

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Wondering how to start an SEO plan for your blog?

Blogging consistently is the number one tip for improving your blog’s SEO. Here are 15 additional and basic SEO ideas for your blog.

If you don’t have a blog yet, you can start one today. In this post, I take you thru 8 easy steps to create your blog on WordPress.

15 Quick and Easy SEO Tips for Beginner Blogger

When it comes to SEO it’s all about Google organic traffic, mainly. Google has a secret formula or algorithm it uses to rank websites and content within sites.

Google also changes this formula from time to time.

No one knows this formula. That doesn’t mean the factors used are a secret. Thru experiments, bloggers and websites owners have figured out some of the key factors weighted in the algorithm.

Google Insights have given us a general framework to look at SEO: 3 Ways we think about SEO

But, here are some specific Search Engine Optimization tips to increase blogs traffic. This list is not all inclusive, it’s just a basic compilation or a must have basics. SEO can get complex, but this list helps us with some of the basic elements of search optimization.

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SEO:The Blog’s basic Framework or Structure

Even though you may be a beginner blogger, it’s important to get the foundation of your site right. Building the structure with sound parts will help you grow your blog’s traffic and provide a good user’s experience at the same time.

Easy SEO Friendly Tips for Bloggers

1. Choose the right host for your blog. A host should provide you with good sites’ response time and speed. These factors are ranked by Google in the formula. Your host has a lot of control over these two factors because it operates your blog’s server.

2. Free hosting vs self hosting. When choosing between, your own hosting vs a free hosting service, do your own hosting. There are free hosting services like WordPress.com and Squarespace that make setting up your blog easy. However, when you use a free host your advertising campaigns can be seriously limited. Also, using free host may not help you with organic traffic.

Bluehost has budget friendly hosting plans to start and run your blog with WordPress.org.

3. Use a good Content Management System or CMS. This is the software that manages the digital content, the blog’s content. It’s important to have a CMS that is updated regularly and that has plugins compatible with the main program.

Also important is to have a CMS you can find help for, in case something needs fixing. WordPress is the most popular CMS. Joomla and Drupal are also widely used.

Related Content: 15 Ways to Make Money with your Photos

4. Get a paid theme for your blog. There are many free themes and if you’re pressed for money go ahead and use a free one. However, a paid premium theme is recommended, even for a beginner’s blog.

A premium theme has all the elements that will help you score points with Google. A Footer, Categories, better coding and regular updates. A premium theme may cost you any where from $40 to $100. You have to think about this money as an investment in your blog. If you get a free theme, it can always be upgraded to a premium one later on.

5. Make your blog mobile responsive. Global search engine is mostly done on mobiles now a days. Google is ranking site’s mobile speed and users’ experience with high priority. If you buy a premium theme most likely it will have a mobile ready function. Some of the free themes are also mobile responsive.

6. Install Google Analytics to improve your blog’s SEO. This is a free tool which provides a lot of information on your site’s users. Data provided include; demographics, where your users live, the type of content your users are reading, where did your visitors come from and where they go after leaving your blog etc.

This site has an informative guide to understanding Google’s Analytics. Along with Analytics, Google Search Console, is another free resource for bloggers. Use them together to understand the users data on your site and to improve your SEO.

Essentials plugins for WordPress for better SEO

7. Install an SEO plugin. Get the Yoast free SEO version for WordPress. WordPress is already an optimized CMS, but this plug in adds more features. Here is the guide to Yoast.

8. Install a security plug in. For WordPress, there is a free version of Wordfence. This is a security plugin that helps prevent and detect intrusions.

9. Install a cache plugin. A browser caching plugin helps to increase the speed of your pages. It does this by reducing the time to access data from the server. W3 Total Cache is the best free plugin for WordPress security.

10. Keyword research. Google Keyword planner is a good tool to research keywords volume in search. You can also use Pinterest and Google auto suggest, these won’t provide volumes.

11. Short tailed vs Long tailed keywords. It’s easier to rank for long tailed keywords. Short term keywords are very competitive, even though there may be a lot more search volume in them.

12. Create a primary Navigation menu. Google crawls your site’s primary menu for keywords and to determine what the site is about. Use keywords that describe your content categories.

13. Use your footer. Include links to your content in the footer. This will show up every time your site is loaded, in every page.

14. Optimize your images. Don’t make your images too big. Large images slow down page’s speed. Do use content description and caption in your images, Google can see this. This also applies for a photography blog SEO.

15. Interlink your related content. Related content enhances the user’s experience. Use links to your other content that are related inside your posts.

16.Update. Minimize the use of your blog’s Primary bar on desktop and laptop view (the one on the right). Use the Primary bar for just a few items. The reason for this is that on Mobile, which is the main traffic source, the Primary bar items are displayed last, at the bottom of the page. So, items placed there have less chance of being looked at by the reader. Also, the more items you add to the front page, the slower the page’s loading.

Summarizing SEO tips for Beginner Bloggers

So, here you have 15+ simple SEO tips for beginner bloggers. SEO can be overwhelming, start slow and keep at it every day. You may even want to dedicate 15 or 20 minutes to learning SEO every day.

You don’t have to be an SEO expert to use optimization techniques effectively. I will continue to add more items to this list, as I learn more of the SEO world.

Let us know which SEO tips have you found to work for you. Do you have an SEO checklist?