SEO Tricks for Your Blog
Believe it or not, there are over 200 rules that go into search engine optimization (SEO). That’s way too many and way too complicated, wouldn’t you agree? However, with that said, my self-publishing indie authors, because being findable, will be part of what makes us successful authorpreneurs; we also have to talk about SEO. There’s no getting around learning and using some SEO strategies is we want to sell more books and make more money than we presently are.
So, here we go on our wild SEO ride… Let’s start with keywords. To become a successful authorpreneurs, we can’t just use any old keywords. We have to put some thought into this and figure out what are the “buyer” keywords.
Which words are the people who are ready to purchase a solution to their problems in our niche thinking of? What will they type into Google when they are prepared to buy a solution to their problems? Those buyer keywords are probably different from someone who is just showing an intellectual interest in our subject, aren’t they?
Next, a pretty cool and often underused keyword strategy is longer keywords. Longer keywords allow us to better target our buyers. With the chain of words used as keywords for us, we can better zero in on the people who are more likely to be interested in our products and services. And while longer keywords will get us fewer people responding to this SEO strategy, these fewer people will be more qualified leads. And that means they are more likely to purchase what we are offering.
Speaking of longer, search engines also like longer blogs. When we write longer blogs, it means people are staying on our page longer because it takes them longer to read what we have written. And when they are putting more of their time into reading our blog, then they are psychologically becoming more engaged with our blog. Thus, they are more likely to click on our links at the end. Search engines love this SEO strategy of longer blogs, and to reward us, they will rank our blogs higher up on Google search pages. And that’s a good thing for us.
It turns out that around 1500 words now is the sweet spot in search engine optimization. That’s roughly four to six pages of content. Now I know this is a bigger time commitment for us authorpreneurs to write something this long on top of everything else we already do. But, look at it this way. We can just kind of rearrange things when it comes to our blog writing. Instead of writing a one-page, 300-word blog, every day, we can do the four to six-page, 1500-word blog once every several days or even once a week maybe…
Also, we need to make sure our blog is mobile-friendly. Remember, everyone uses their phones today.
Now, back to SEO keywords. We want to do searches in our niche and see what keywords the influencers are using. When we find out what those keywords are, we want to use them, too.
However, if the big boys and girls of our industry are using these keywords, then there probably are a lot of people out there using these really popular keywords. When someone does a search using one of these popular keywords, then a lot of stuff will pop up. And we probably won’t be one of them on the first page of Google.
Now, I’m not saying to not use these popular keywords. We should use them because we could get some traffic from them. This is especially true if we’re working our tails off and being wise about positioning ourselves within our niche. So, these popular keywords are good, but we should be using some other keywords as well.
Try to find some other less popular keywords. Consider who else would benefit from your products and services. These “who else” people may be just off to the side of the mainstream people for your products and services. These keywords are related keywords that can bring in a whole new related market that goes right to you because you’re positioned well, and you’re not competing with the big boys and girls in this particular niche.
The mainstream keywords and related keywords are a nice combination of search engine optimization. This is a great SEO trick that, when done well, is guaranteed to get you more visitors, more clicks, and more sales.
So, there you have it, folks. You don’t have to kill yourself over SEO. But, you do need to know and practice a few basics. Good luck, and now get going in planning how to tackle your SEO plan.
*Check out the free video lesson on this chapter!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWgNOdeLxag&list=PL_-39bUXJitwL8cHUpiZ5mO0-JJuaPOVl&index=64