8. Encourage social sharing
8. Encourage social sharing
Actively encourage your readers to share your blog posts.
If they follow these encouragements, not only should you see a rise in traffic to your posts, but you may also be sending subtle ‘signals’ to search engines regarding the popularity and quality of your posts (the jury is out on whether social sharing has a direct impact on search results, but there does seem to be a correlation of sorts).
Using a tool like Sumo or Addthis – which allow you to add a truckload of clever social sharing icons to various parts of your website, as well as data capture forms - can help in this regard.
9. Encourage comments and user engagement
Encourage people (yes, even trolls!) to add their own views at the bottom of your posts. There are three reasons why this is beneficial:
- It creates more keyword-rich content on your website
- It can help encourage return visits to your blog, as discussions take hold on your comments section
- Some SEO experts believe that Google treats posts which generate a lot of community discussion preferentially to those without any comments.
10. Build backlinks to your posts
At the simplest level, there are two key ingredients to ensuring a blog post ranks in search:
First, your post has to be contain quality content.
Second, it has to have a lot of backlinks — links from other sites — pointing to it.
We've covered the 'quality content' bit earlier: you basically need to focus on producing long-form posts which cover the topic you're writing about clearly, and in considerable depth.
Getting backlinks is often a harder task, as it involves reaching out to other bloggers and asking them to include a link to your content on their posts. This is a time consuming affair, but it's absolutely essential, and if you take a thorough approach to it, it can prove very fruitful.
First, your post has to be contain quality content.
Second, it has to have a lot of backlinks — links from other sites — pointing to it.
We've covered the 'quality content' bit earlier: you basically need to focus on producing long-form posts which cover the topic you're writing about clearly, and in considerable depth.
Getting backlinks is often a harder task, as it involves reaching out to other bloggers and asking them to include a link to your content on their posts. This is a time consuming affair, but it's absolutely essential, and if you take a thorough approach to it, it can prove very fruitful.
Another option with regard to backlink generation is to hire an agency to build links for you — but you have to be careful here, as hiring an agency or consultant who then goes onto place or buy links on low-quality sites can actually do more harm than good.
You'll find a really helpful list of link building suggestions over on the Backlinko website.
You'll find a really helpful list of link building suggestions over on the Backlinko website.
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