How to write effective and SEO-friendly blogs?

Everybody around you seems to be blogging and talk about effective and SEO-friendly content. You get all of this but don’t know how would you write SEO-friendly content. Where do you start? And what to blog about? How to structure content so that it shows up on Google SERP and drive traffic to your blog.

If you are interested in details, read on!
 
 
 
 
 

Where to Blog?

The following websites are the easiest ways to start a new blog:

Each of them have a free offering, with simple and easy-to-use interface.

If you don’t know which one to pick, start with wordpress.com‌. It gives you 3GB space. My entire blog with all themes, images, media, text is ~416 MB. So there is a good likelihood that you may not exceed 3GB. If you are feeling adventurous then you can host a WordPress instance on OpenShift. This is also fairly straight forward and gives you more control of the WordPress instance (customization, plugins, menus, etc). But the basic one on wordpress.com is good to start with.

If you are one of those nerdy types, then you can even consider setting up Awestruct/Asciidoc-based blog as well.

Another option is GitHub Pages is another option. This is particularly useful if you are contributing on GitHub. Otherwise one of the earlier options is easier and simpler to use.

Migrate from an existing blog?

Do you have an existing blog on a non-Wordpress site? There are plenty of plugins to migrate from those platforms to WordPress:

Your blog is only relevant if it shows up in Google’s SERP. Several of the guidelines below are provided to get a higher SEO for your blog entry, or making it SEO-friendly. Note, that it takes time for the blog to start showing up in first page, so be patient!

Guidelines for SEO-friendly

Here is the complete set of WordPress plugins on my blog:

Plugin Name/Website Header 2
Akismet Checks your comments against the Akismet Web service to see if they look like spam or not
Captcha Allows you to implement super security captcha form into web forms
Crayon Syntax Highlighter Syntax Highlighter supporting multiple languages, themes, fonts, highlighting from a URL, local file or post text
Display PHP Version Displays the current PHP version in the “At a Glance” admin dashboard widget
Easy Table Create table in post, page, or widget in easy way using CSV format. This can also display table from CSV file.
EWWW Image Optimizer Reduce file sizes for images in WordPress using lossless/lossy methods and image format conversion.
FD Feedburner Plugin Redirects the main feed and optionally the comments feed seamlessly and transparently to Feedburner.com.
Google XML Sitemaps Generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog
Quttera Web Malware Scanner Scans your WordPress website for known and unknown malware and other suspicious activities
Share a Draft Let your friends preview one of your drafts, without giving them permissions to edit posts in your blog
Smart 404 Automatically redirect to the content the user was most likely after, or show suggestions, instead of showing an unhelpful 404 error.
Sociable Enable simplified sharing of blog/pages sharing on social media
Tiny Google Analytics Adds Google Analytics Tracking Code using an optimzed code
Ultimate Tag Cloud Widget Configurable tag cloud widget
UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore Backup and restoration made easy. Complete backups; manual or scheduled (backup to S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, Rackspace, FTP, SFTP, email + others).
WordPress SEO Improve your WordPress SEO
WP Custom Search Allows searching by custom post types on your website.
WP Open Graph Add facebook open graph protocol to your blog
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin Display a list of related posts on your site based on a powerful unique algorithm.

More details on WordPress SEO.

What are your tips for making your blog SEO-friendly?

Exit mobile version