What Is SEO For A Website? How To Gain Traffic on Your Blog

What is SEO for a website for? Search Engine optimization (SEO) is about helping search engines understand and present content. So, what is on page SEO for a website? On-page SEO focuses on optimizing parts of your website that you have control over. But why is SEO important to your website? The best way to increase traffic on your blog, is to use SEO to optimize your site for users.

If you are wondering how to gain traffic on your blog, you must first understand what is SEO for a website.

What Is SEO For A Website For?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It involves optimizing web pages to get ranked by search engines in search results (SERPs).

The best way to increase traffic on your blog, is through SEO. SEO is one of the best methods for your blog to gain high-quality traffic, month after month.

It might not bring you an immediate result, but with time and consistent effort, it will. So it is important to understand that it is not a get-rich-quick scheme.

SEO is an integral part of affiliate marketing and it typically takes 3 to 6 months to rank on Google.

You can drive organic traffic from several sources, including social media, forum posts, email marketing and blog posts. To drive traffic, you need to optimize your blog posts with on page SEO.

What Is On Page SEO For A Website?

On page SEO is the part of your website that you have control over. This includes URLs, meta descriptions, title tags, content, headlines and headers, image optimization, structured data, internal links and more.

It includes adding keywords in the title, meta description, first paragraph, headers and image alt description.

With more users browsing the internet via their mobile device, it is also essential that your website is mobile friendly. Search engines prioritize sites that perform well on a mobile device.

So, choose a theme that loads quickly and is mobile friendly. Generate Press is a 100% responsive theme and will adjust to match the size of your screen, regardless of whether it is your phone or computer.

Why is on page SEO important for your blog?

• Every day bloggers upload approximately 7.5 million posts across the globe.
• Only 60% of internet users actually read the content, most just skim it.
• In-depth information in long-form content is preferred by most readers. So the minimum word count should be 1,500 words, with the ideal between 2,000 and 2,300 words.
• Content marketing is an industry that is worth multi billion dollars.

So why is it important to have the best SEO practices for your blog?

Why Is SEO Important To Your Website?

SEO helps to drive organic traffic to your blog. If SEO is done correctly, your blog can appear in search results and your blog can easily rank for relevant search queries.

Google is getting smarter every day, and in simple terms, SEO is the connecting dot. If you blog is not optimized for SEO, you will probably not achieve the desired results. SEO done properly, will help you:

• Reach more people.
• Provide quality leads.
• Create brand awareness and build brand authority.
• Improve website visitor engagement rates.
• Deliver a cost-effective practice.

Google’s search algorithms use more than 200 factors to rank websites. Unfortunately Google does not tell us what those factors are. Thus, you have to use the best practices, to help you get more traffic to your website.

So what can you do to attract massive quality traffic to your website? Are there ways how to gain traffic on your blog?

The Best Way To Increase Traffic On Your Blog

There are several ways in which you can optimize your website to increase traffic and engagement.

Relevant Keywords

Keywords are very important to optimize your blog content for search engines. But, it doesn’t help to use just any keywords, they need to be relevant.

So, for every piece of content that you create, you must find relevant keywords to use in your blog post. Keyword research is therefore crucial.

• Make a list of relevant keywords based on your topic.
• Look at Google auto-complete and related search to get more ideas.
• Use a keyword research tool, like Jaaxy or Ubersuggest, to find search volume and level of difficulty for keywords.

When it comes to finding keywords that you want to rank for, Google is your friend. Even simple searches can provide you with many ideas. Google Ad’s keyword planner can give you great insight into what people are searching for.

However, there is also a technical side to SEO that goes beyond keywords and content. When you are just starting out, keep it simple. So, don’t get too bogged down by the details of technical SEO, that can come later.

By incorporating relevant keywords in your content, you will get more traffic and engagement. But avoid keyword stuffing or word repetition in content that doesn’t make sense.

When writing, to get better results, you also need to keep in mind the search intent.

Satisfy The Search Intent

Search intent is the way people search and the reason behind an online search query. It is the motivation that a user has when doing a specific online search. You have to understand the motivation and human psychology behind people’s internet searches, which means you have to master search intent.

Search intent is solution based search to help solve a problem and look for answers. It also helps the search engines understand what the user wants to see in the results. Search engine result pages (SERPs) are the new real estate in the digital world.

There are 4 types of search intent:

• Informational intent: the visitor is looking for precise information on a topic or an answer to solve a problem. Informational searches will often include words like “how to…”, “guide to…”, “what is ..”, “best way to..”. It could be “how to start a petrol lawnmower” or “best website host services“.
• Navigational intent: people want to visit a specific web page or company, like Apple or Walmart. So they already know where they want to go. Thus, make sure your website can be found when somebody searches for your company name.
• Transactional intent: The visitor is ready to take action and sign up for a service or make a purchase. When people are searching with transactional intent, they want to buy something now. Usually it means they already know what they want, they just want to find the best deal. Keywords with transactional intent will often include words like “buy”, “discount”, “product name”.
• Commercial investigation: people use the web to do research on something to buy. They also have transactional intent, but are first doing research about the available choices. For instance “What is eco friendly yoga clothes?”

Understanding the search intent of your audience, allows you to know the content they would like to see in their search engine results. If you are looking for a recipe to make Thai chicken curry, you expect to find recipes, not Thai restaurants.

So, to satisfy search intent, you need to do the following:

• Before optimizing your content, understand the search intent.
• As a comparison, look at the top-ranking pages and examine their approach, formatting and tone.
• Align on-page SEO elements like, your blog’s URL, headings, meta description etc. with keywords and search intent.
• Create useful content that users want to see in the search results.
• Make sure the information and data you provide, is high quality and well researched.

Thus, when creating content, include these tips to satisfy search intent and get higher rankings for your content. Your blog can attract more traffic and engagement if you rank for search intent.

Additionally, to increase blog traffic, incorporate internal links in your content strategy.

Add Internal Links

Internal linking is adding relevant links to blog posts on the same domain. So if you are talking about starting a blog, you can link it to a previous post that you have written on the topic. (which is what I have done here)

Internal links can guide visitors and search engines to your most important resources. These are some benefits of using internal links:

• It helps search bots crawl and index your blog posts.
• Increases user retention and reduce the bounce rate. Visitors stay on your page for longer.
• Improves Page Rank and Page Views.
• It indicates which keywords you want to rank for.

You could add hundreds of links to your content, but without overdoing it. Standard practice is not to have more than 150 links in any single post. Optimum number is 5 to 10 links in a single blog post.

Use external links to related pages on authority sites. This can help Google figure out the topic of your page and shows the quality of your page.

Only include relevant links that relate to the topic. Revisit older blog posts and add new internal links to newer posts. You can further boost your blog by improving user experience.

Improve User Experience

You should build a website to benefit your audience. Any optimization should be geared towards making the user experience better. A search engine is one of those users, and it helps other users to discover your content.

To learn how people interact with your website, search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, use data. They look at how much time visitors spend on your blog posts and which other pages they visit on your site.

They rank your blog posts in the search result pages (SERP’s), based on these metrics. So, it becomes essential to improve the user experience of the visitors to your blogs.

These are a few ways in which to ensure visitors have a good experience:

• Make sure your blog is mobile friendly. With so many more people accessing the internet via mobile devices, it is essential your blog posts and website are mobile friendly.
• Improve your page loading speed, as it impacts bounce rates. If you page is slow in loading, visitors will leave your site.
• Provide navigation options that are easy to access.
• Use sub headers (H1, H2, H3) in your blogs. This makes it easier to read.
• Add relevant images and graphics to your content. It makes it look more inviting and interesting to visitors.

Besides all of these, we are writing for people and you must create original content.

Consistently Create Quality Content

Creating quality content refers to writing blog posts that provide value to visitors. Your blog posts should be unique and not contain duplicate content. It must also be relevant to the topic.

To improve the quality of your content, it must make sense to the reader. So, yes, you are creating content with search engines in mind, but ultimately your content must be created with a real person in mind.

Guidelines to create quality content:

• Identify and understand your target audience.
• Create an outline of your blog post.
• Write captivating strong headlines. A catchy title will attract attention and increase engagement with your audience.
• Write a concise introduction that relates to your topic.
• Use bullet points to improve readability and user experience.
• Use examples to explain specific points.
• Provide tips and solutions.
• Incorporate a conversational tone, as if you are chatting to your friend.
• Use easy and simple language. Don’t try to impress with fancy vocabulary that the average visitor will not understand.
• Every paragraph should provide information.
• Include statistics, expert opinions and research data and link to relevant studies.

Before publishing your post, check for readability and spelling and grammar errors. Thus, proofread it and if needs be, rewrite certain sections where you can see room for improvement.

More SEO Tips On How To Gain Traffic On You Blog

When you have a new website with no traffic yet, SEO is very important. To get more organic search from Google and other search engines, use these tips:

• Post regularly: your site needs to be updated frequently so that Google knows it is active. Decide on a posting frequency that is realistic and achievable for you. Ideally you need to post at least 3 times per week, but if you cannot manage that, aim for at least once a week.
• Use topic clusters: if you have a central topic or “pillar” that you can delve deeper into, you can create more posts around it. So create in-depth posts and then link back to the central posts.
• Write longer articles: ideally you blog posts need to be over 2,000 words. If you really want to rank for a post, it needs to be over 2,300 words.
• Proper use of keywords:
• Share the best content: don’t just create content for the sake of it, share all your valuable knowledge. Promote your blog across different social media channels to maximize exposure to your blog. If you need help with social sharing, Missinglettr has an awesome automated tool that I use and you can read the full Missinglettr review here. This will help you to attract more readers and increase your blog’s reach.
• Play the rules of SEO: Always apply “white hat” SEO strategies, no “black hat” strategies.
• Get quality backlinks: plan a proper backlink strategy and see which sites will help you. Guest posting is a good way of getting your link on another site.

Final Thoughts On What Is SEO For A Website For

The ultimate goal is to end the search journey. To rank on page 1 of search engines, you actually have to provide the best possible answers.

The best way to increase your blog traffic on your blog, is to incorporate SEO in your overall content strategy. And, remember to be patient. Results will follow, but it will take time and effort.

SEO can help your website to rank higher in search results. Therefore, it can drive more traffic to your site. So, you now know why is SEO important to your website.

If you have any questions about what is on page SEO for a website, or suggestions on how to gain traffic on your blog, then please leave them in the comments below, and I will get back to you.