It used to be easy to rank well with your blog posts. Just find some keywords that hadn’t been over used, write an article and get it referenced a few times by other sites. Hey presto, you ranked! It’s not like that anymore.
For one thing, the search engine algorithms have gotten a lot better. For another, there is so much more competition out there. That makes it hard indeed to rank well. For that reason, I decided it was time to write you an article to give you a better idea of what you’re supposed to do.
So here are 3 ways that you can effectively improve your blog positions.
1. Group keywords
Yeah sure, in the past you wrote a blog post about one keyword and that was that. Well, that idea is well and properly dead. And about time! Articles can be about a wide range of things, after all, and be relevant to a wide range of questions.
To represent that, you need to search for a group of keywords and combine all of them into your article. There are a number of ways to do this. The one most discussed out there is to simply type your keyword into Google and to then find out what words Google spits back at you.
You can find these at the bottom of the first page of result.
These words are, according to Google, related to the search term that you’ve used. So you’ll strengthen your article by simply including these.
Don’t stop there, however. Check out websites like thesaurus.com to find out what are natural synonyms of the word that you’ve selected. Then add these words in there as well. In this way, you’ll not only make yourself look like you actually read a dictionary (even if it is a thesaurus) but you’ll also be using a wider variety of keywords.
2. Don’t only work on new material
A big mistake that many blog writers make is that they write an article, see if it gains any traction and then move on to the next one. That’s like trying to run a race on only one foot!
Instead, what you should do is take those pages that are doing well and work on making those better. This will not only make the people that end up arriving there find what they’re looking for but will also make it so that Google ranks you higher.
So how should you make your pages better? There are tons of ways, but the best ones are to add more links to useful information, cut out the fluff, make the text easier to read get editing help from experts and in other ways work to condense the information and increase the density.
The best news? Google will notice that you’re changing the websites, increasing the information density and making it more useful. And that will make your page rank far more highly.
Remember, on the internet, not all your pages will serve as landing pages. So, instead of getting a trickle of traffic from a lot of semi-optimized sites, work on getting a flood of traffic from a few really optimized sites. These will then consume the rest of your content as well.
3. Reference brands, people, and places
The Google algorithm works by creating structures of concepts and seeing what websites relate closest to these constructs. In other words, if you’re going to write about Paris, then it expects you to link to things that are to be found in Paris.
If you’re going to write about A scientific concept like Evolution, then it might expect you to discuss Darwin or other important figures in the scientific development of the theory of Evolution.
For that reason, if you’re discussing some concept or idea, it is important that you actually link to the movers and shakers in that field.
That sound a bit abstract to you? Yeah, it’s a little complicated. Fortunately, there are tools out there that you can use to get a better idea of entities. For example, run a couple of pages through AlchemyAPI and you’ll get an idea of what entities are represented on that page. Your best bet is to take pages that rank high for the concepts that you’re looking into and run those through the program, to get a better idea of what they’re putting in their text (and what you should put in there too).
Last words
Ranking well on Google is becoming more difficult as the competition heats up. You need to have a better understanding of what you’ve got to do to rank well. Yes, that is frustrating. At the same time, if you can make your blog posts – or even just one blog post – rank well in a good area of keywords, that can get you so much traffic that it’s well worth the effort.
After all, more and more people are constantly coming online. That means there are constantly more people out there who are interested in getting the answers that your blog can provide. All you’ve got to do is make sure that your audience knows that you’re there, to answer whatever questions you may have.
From there, it will become easier as the number of links to your website build and you gain a following. After all, the algorithm that Google uses might have become more sophisticated, but that doesn’t’ mean that there is no longer any value in how many links are pointing to your site.
Contributed byhttp://pickthewriter.com/
