Five SEO Blog Tips to Help Increase Traffic to Your Site

If you’re new to the writing game, you may not be aware of some of the essential steps needed to actually get in the game - steps that will make your name and brand visible. And, visibility is a ‘biggie’ if you want to increase traffic to your site and move forward in your writing career.

One very interesting fact about having content online is you never know who will end up finding it. It could be an agent, a publisher, someone who wants to hire you for your writing style. You get the idea.

Why is it important to become familiar with SEO blog tips?

Simply put, the answer is to generate visibility.

Writing is no longer a solitary career. Now, if you want to create and build visibility, along with readers to your site (traffic), you need to build an online platform and promote it.

So, what are some tips to help you get started in the right direction?

Well, the very first and most obvious tip is to have a website or blogsite. Once you have one set up, it’s your job to post content to it on a regular basis, no less than once a week, two or three times a week is better though.

It’s that content that will establish you as an expert in your genre or area. This will help you down the road, after you’ve traditionally published or self-published one, five, ten, or more books and/or e-books, and you want to expand your writing career.

But, before we go over five of the basic SEO blog tips for new writers, let’s first go over what SEO actually stands for: Search Engine Optimization. This marketing strategy allows the search engines, such as Google, to find your site and content.

Being aware of SEO strategies is essential to having the search engines not only find your site, but to also index your content, and make it available to online searchers.

Five SEO Blog Tips:

1. Use a keyword in your article title. Try one of the free keyword search tools to find an effective keyword. I use http://googlekeywordtool.com/

A keyword, according to Compendium.com, is “any word or phrase a searcher might use to describe or identify a desired resource on the Internet.”

2. Use that keyword in your article’s subheadings, and be sure to bold or italicize your subheadings.

3. Use that keyword within the content – just don’t overdo it. You don’t want to stuff your article with as many ‘visibility generating’ keywords you can fit in, search engines frown upon this practice. Your article needs to be an informative, engaging, and understandable.

You primary focus should be to write for your reader. Today, for effective marketing your content needs to be shareable. This means your readers need to feel motivated to ‘share’ the post.

4. When searching for effective keywords, look for long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are words that will move you away from highly competitive keywords.

As an example, if you write business articles, a generic and highly competitive keyword might be ‘incentives.’ I did a Google keyword search and the keyword ‘incentives’ came in at: 1,500,000 global monthly searches, and 823,000 local monthly searches. Obviously, you wouldn’t want to use a keyword with that much competition.

That’s where the long-tail keyword comes in.

If you used the keyword ‘business incentive,’ you’d reduce your competition to 22,200 global monthly searches and 14,800 local monthly searches. That’s quite a difference, and it narrows your target. Remember, you want to hit as close to your target market bulls-eye as possible.

5. The final bit of advice is to let the social networking sites know you have new content. Post the content link to Twitter, Facebook, GooglePlus, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. You should also inform your groups. Get the word out. And, be sure to have a SHARE button so visitors can share the post also.

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Boost your writing and marketing efforts with Karen Cioffi. Visit http://karencioffiwritingandmarketing.com and sign up for her FREE newsletter, The Writing World (top right sidebar).