The internet is awash with blogs, websites, images, content, games, people, and everything. It’s part of what makes the web so great, but it can also be a massive downfall if you’re seeking to get real and substantial traffic and visitors to your own site. You can find anything on the web, and if you’re just starting out and have an idea, there’s a 99% chance someone has already done what you are planning to do.
That’s why it’s so important to invest time, effort, and sometimes money into getting found online. Optimizing your site or blog for search engines is a multi-million-pound industry as it is such an imperative factor when you are setting up and posting on any blog or website you set up and work on or with. Sure, you can employ the services of an SEO agency or digital marketing guru to help you make the necessary changes, but you can also carry out these changes on your own as well. To that end, there are plenty of resources online and I’m hoping Blog Circle will be one of those resources you come to to get information about how to get found online.
On this page, I’ll be giving a brief overview of what it means to get found online and the very basic things everyone should do to build a basic SEO setup for your blog or website to be the foundation for getting found online and building real traffic and page views – which equates to real money!
Find Your Niche
No doubt, when you dreamt up an idea for a blog, you knew it was going to be a certain topic or theme that you were going to be writing about. This is called your niche, and it needs to be as narrowed down as possible. The more specific the theme of your blog, the more special of an audience and this special audience will be people that will NEED your site. Once you’ve found your niche, this is when the real work begins to fully and properly optimise your blog.
So you’ve got your niche – now what? I hate to say it, but at this point, you have to take a step backwards. Sorry! What I mean by this, is you have to understand how Google (and other search engines) work. To put it basically, search engines look for what your site is about so that when people search for something relevant to your site, there’s a chance yours may come up in the search results. They identify this by looking for keywords that help to identify your site’s niche. There are other factors in play to determine where your site will place in the rank of the results, so who appears first.
So, you’ll need to hunt out some decent keywords that really and deeply describe what your site is about so that more relevant people are able to find you. You need to find a mix of tight keywords, long tail keywords and medium tail keywords and make sure that the writing on your pages includes these keywords naturally. You’ll also need to do some research into the search volume of these keywords to make sure people are actually looking for what it is that you’re basing your SEO on, when you use Google’s Keyword Planner, you get a note of whether a keyword has high, medium or low competition value. The best bet is to go with medium competition, so you know people are searching for it, but not a huge amount of people are trying to rank for it.
Domain Authority
If you’ve never looked into SEO then you probably don’t know what domain authority is, which is totally ok as if you’re not in the SEO world, then you most likely won’t. Domain authority is basically how important, relevant and safe your site is, the more important, relevant and safe it is, the higher they will put you in the results.
You can find out the domain authority of your site by using Moz’s free open site explorer. The scale is 1-100 and every site gets a domain authority of 1 when it is first created and from there, you have to build it up yourself.
One of the ways Da can be improved is by getting other sites to link to yours. If a site with better authority links to yours, it tells Google that your site is also important and can increase your domain authority. You can also use the open site explorer to compare your target keyword to other sites who are ranking on page one for it. If their DA is higher than yours, you’ll either have to choose another keyword or do lots of work to make your DA higher.
Social is The Hero
Social media has taken over the world and it’s no secret. We’re living in a Black Mirror episode where everyone, everything and all personal information is held in profile pages and status updates. Because it is the biggest industry in the internet world, social media is key to spreading the word and getting found. Writing great content is fab, but if you want traffic and visitors then the best way to do this is to share to the biggest platforms in the world, you get exposure that can be much harder to gain just by SEO.
If the content is good and it reaches the right people, the shares will get a good reach and gain more clicks and will spread the message you want to tell the world. If the shares get good, it could lead to natural backlinks as a decent resource that people genuinely want to link to, without you even asking.
An Overview
So, you’ve read this page. To sum it up in a few words – solidify your niche, find the right keywords, build content around those keywords, post regularly, build backlinks and share to your social channels. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? It’s simple but still complicated and if you want more detailed guides, then make sure you keep up to date with the blogs I’ll be posting regularly.
This is the most basic guide you’ll get, but I hope it gives you a starting point of what to look into more and what it is you need to be researching to make sure you are getting found online.