4

5 Extremely Actionable SEO Tips For Beginners When Starting A New Blog

Last modified on 8th January, 2019

Are you looking for SEO tips on how to rank number #1 on Google using high impact SEO ranking strategies?

Are you an SEO beginner or wonder what you can do to improve your position on Google search results?

If you just started blogging (or working on an existing one) here are some SEO tips to help you out.

Related: 9 Quick SEO Tips and Tricks For Blogs

 

Introduction

Getting the number #1 ranking was pretty easy 10 years ago. In  2005, I got a new website ranked on the first page of Google for keywords of my choice in my niche pretty fast, just based on the on-page ranking factors, without any external backlinks.

I hand-coded the website to sell a CD burner software that I developed myself. I was pretty hands-on with everything. Besides I had no money to pay other people to do it for me 🙂

I knew I was ranking with the right keywords because I began making sales  within a couple of days the website went online. The best thing was I spent zero on advertising. If you perform a Google search, the website no longer exists. Oh, the good old days…

I hate to break it to you…

But getting number one ranking on Google today is very-very hard. However, there are a couple things you can do to increase your chances of appearing at least on the first page of Google.

If you just started your blog or website, follow these SEO tips to start off on the right foot. They are the exact SEO ranking strategies I performed on Sabahan.com as I get Sabahan.com ready for prime time 🙂

If you are a newbie and are wondering  what is SEO. It stands for “search engine optimisation”. It is the practice of increasing the quality of your blog or web page content to make sure it’s ranked well on the search result based on what the search engine considers most relevant its users.

All major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo have their own ranking criteria but in this article, I am going to focus on Google. OK let’s get started with the search engine optimisation tips number 1.

 

 

1. Focus on Writing Thorough and Extremely Helpful Content

Blogs that write about everything won’t rank as well as blogs that focus on one single niche very thoroughly.

Try to write a post that solves a problem your readers have. Go in-depth by breaking down everything your readers would want to learn.

For example, if you want to teach people how to start a blog,  breakdown your post by creating separate sections and talk about the followings:

• Why you should start a blog
• Before you start you should…?
• What topics should your write about
• Which web hosting to host your blog
• What are the differences between WordPress.com, WordPress.org and Blogger?
• Selecting the right theme for your WordPress blog
• How can you make money from your blog
• You get the idea…

This naturally leads you to write very lengthy posts.

But that is OK because Google prefers longer post. In fact, the average word count of a Google first page result is 1,890 words.

My point is, you need to write very thoroughly and extremely helpful content that covers as many angles as you can for the topic. Include as much helpful information in one post as necessary.

Ideally, your post should offer much more than what your visitors initially asked for. This helps your article to become very share-worthy on the social media.

 

How Google Hummingbird Update Rewards Helpful Content

In 2013 Google announced an update called Hummingbird where it prefers websites that focus on one single niche rather than those that write about everything and anything that took their fancy.

Google prefers pages with an in-depth answer and not just those that give you exactly what you type in.

For example, before Hummingbird, a search for “acid reflux prescription” would return pages like this. While it did give you what you type, it might not necessarily be the most helpful in treating the disease.

Now, Google will return pages such as this. The page contains information about the diagnosis your doctor might recommend, information about possible treatment, options for over-the-counter medication or whether you even need drugs.

Notice how thorough and helpful the page is and how it includes more information in addition to the prescription you asked for in your original query.

 

 

2. Optimise Your Title Tag and Meta Description

Having a good title tag and meta description is given since the beginning of search engine optimisation if you want to rank properly.

When you do a search on Google,  each entry in the search result contains a link at the top which is the title tag and a description below which is called the meta description.

If  you search for the phrase “make money online” for example, you will more likely click on a search result that contains the phrase “make money online” either in the title or description because it’s related to what you’re looking for.

This tells Google that they should priorities results which contain the search term you are looking. So make sure to include your preferred keywords in your title and meta description for some ranking juice.

Is it enough?

Simply including your keywords in the title and meta description is not enough. Make sure you also do the following:

• Your sentence should flow and easy to read.
• It should pique the reader’s interest so that they click your listing
• Avoid repeating your keywords.

 

How to Edit Your Title and Meta Description Using Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin

You can change your existing or create a new keyword-focus title and meta description for your posts using the Yoast SEO plugin.

The plugin also comes with many other SEO optimisation functions but we are going to focus on the snippet editor, which allows you to edit your meta title and meta description in WordPress.

Once you have the plugin installed, just follow these steps to start optimizing your meta information on a post or page.

1. Create a new post or select an existing post to edit.
2. Scroll down to the WordPress text editor until you find the section titled “Yoast SEO”.
   
3. Click “Edit  snippet” (see image below).
4. Edit the text listed under the “SEO title”, “Slug” and “Meta description” to include your keywords. Yoast will calculate the length of your text. Make sure the color-coded bar under each text box stays green.
5. Check the “Snippet preview” and make your title, slug and meta description appear the way you intended.
6. Once you are satisfied, click the “Close snippet editor” button.
   

Keep in mind that the updated title and meta description won’t be reflected right away in Google search results. You can speed up this process by following these steps.

To get crawled faster, use Google Webmaster Search Tool which I am going to discuss in the next SEO tip.

 

 

3. Use Google Search Console to Rank On Google

If you are not already a Google Search Console user, drop everything you are doing right now and sign up.

 

Formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, it’s a free service by Google for webmasters. It allows you to check indexing status and optimize visibility of your blog or website.

More importantly, it will help you improve your Google rankings.

After you sign up, give it a few days for Google to populate the data.

 

Improve Your Blog With Search Analytics

One of the most important data you want to check is the Search Analytics.

The Search Analytics shows all the pages on your website that are getting traffic from Google search.

Since I started reviving Sabahan.com from the dead recently, right off the bat I noticed several issues reported by the console that I need fixing.

Some of the queries Sabahan.com were ranked for have nothing to do with the niche the blog is in.

While those search terms used to bring me traffic, which was  good for getting page impressions for my AdSense ads, the traffic they attracted were totally unrelated to my niche.

You see, Sabahan.com used to be more like a personal blog.

However, in 2018, I’ve decided to change things and treat it more like a business blog.

I need to put the SEO Tips #1 above into practice. So I will focus more on topics that are highly relevant to my making money blogging niche.

As tempting as it is for me to have as many pages as possible indexed in an attempt to boost traffic, it will only dilute the focus of my blog which could affect my search engine rankings.

My focus today is on search engine optimization techniques, better blogging and content marketing, building your mailing list, affiliate marketing and so on. So no more topics like the average IQ of the Australian aboriginal!

To fix this issue, I can either delete those pages or prevent Google crawler from indexing them using a Robots.txt file or via noindex Meta tag.

I won’t discuss these methods here because it’s not something you would normally do when you start a new blog.

 

Find Out How Many Times Google Shows Your Pages In The Search Results

You can also find out which of your pages or posts are getting impressions. What I mean by impressions are the number of times your pages are shown on the Google search results.

When you do a search, you don’t always click through on a result, but when Google shows your post in their search result, it counts as an impression.

So from the Google Search Console, you can track:

• How many impressions you get
• How many clicks you get
• Your click-through rate or CTR
• Your page position

 

So, why is this information useful?

I’ll explain in the next section.

 

Use Google Search Console to Improve Your Click Thru Rate and Ranking

Google Search Analysis shows you all the keywords that you are getting impressions for and your click-through rate. Normally, most pages would get less than 5% CTR.

This is great because you can use this information to improve your title tag and meta description to get more clicks on your listing.

When Google notices your listing get more clicks than your competitor above you, they are going to rank you higher.

Why?

Because it tells Google what their users prefer. They prefer you over your competitors.

 

Use Google Search Console to Improve Your Content & Attract More Traffic

What you can do is take all the keywords that you are getting impressions for and start including them in your copy.

But don’t do this just to make your content  filled with keywords. Make sure your writing flows naturally and that it makes sense.

 

Use Google Search Console to Rank Number #1

If you already have a country specific domain such as .com.my or .co.uk, Google already associated it with that specific country.

But if your site has a generic top-level domain, such as .com or .org, you can use the International Targeting feature to tell Google which countries are most important to you.

This is useful if your business serves a country specific-audience. So you will experience better results in the country that you are targeting.

It’s also a good idea if you want the local audience to notice you more as it helps you to stand out locally.

You may want to keep the box unchecked to target a global audience if:

• Your products/services can be sold anywhere.
• Targeting the United States is too competitive.
• You want the ‘global advantage’ but still want Google to associate your blog with a particular region.

For the third point, if you get more backlinks from your own country for instance, it signals Google to give some importance to you in your own country.

If you want to ensure your blog is not associated with any country or region at all, you can select Unlisted in the drop-down list.

This will tell Google that you’re targeting a broad, global audience or region, diminishing the importance of backlinks from any country.

Keep in mind that when you change your blog international targeting, it may affect your existing rankings as Google will need to reassess your  blog using a new set of rules.

While the effect maybe temporary, I would only recommend doing this early on or  when you haven’t got many high ranking keywords yet, just to be on the safe side.

 

 

4. Increase Your Blog Loading Speed

Focusing on offering great user experience is important because Google wants to rank content that is actually useful for users. One way you can achieve this is by increasing your blog or website loading speed.

A slow loading website will hurt your organic search performance as well as your business. According to Hubspot, a 1-second delay in website loading speed can reduce website conversions by 7%. The good news is reducing your average loading time has the opposite effect.

At the very minimum, you should aim to get your website loading speed to three seconds or below.

 

Use Pingdom & Google PageSpeed Insight to Benchmark Your Page Load Time

Go to tools.pingdom.com and enter your URL. Run your blog through Pingdom several times  from different location to get the average loading speed.

It is important to have this benchmark because it allows you to track your progress as you made changes to your blog structures or implement improvements.

There are countless ways you can improve your blog loading speed. But one of the biggest factors that determine how fast your website actually loads is your web hosting.

I’ve used Hostgator before but as they moved their support from the ticketing system to chat, the quality deteriorates so much it forced me to switch my webhost.

If you are looking for a reliable WordPress hosting for your blog, you can check BlueHost.

In Pingdom, scroll down to the Performance insights section where you can see suggestions on what you can do to improve your web page loading time. Unfortunately, most of the suggestions are very technical for a newbie to implement.

The good news is there are WordPress plugins you can install that will implement some of the suggestions without the need for you to tinker with the technical aspect.

In addition to Pingdom, you can also use Google PageSpeed Insights. Google will analyze the content of your web page for mobile and desktop, then generates suggestions to make that page faster.

So as a beginner without a technical know-how, how do you implement Pingdom or Google page optimization suggestions? It’s actually quite easy. Most of the suggestions can be incorporated easily into your blog by installing the W3 Total Cache plugin.

 

Install  W3 Total Cache Plugin for WordPress to Increase Your Blog Loading Time Speed

W3 Total Cache is one of the most popular caching plugins for WordPress.

They claim to improve the SEO and user experience of your blog by increasing your blog performance and reducing download times via features like the content delivery network (CDN) integration and caching.

After installing W3 Total Cache plugin for Sabahan.com, right off the bat, I noticed the loading time decreased significantly.

Most of the changes suggested by Pingdom such caching of pages and post, database caching, minification of CSS, Javascript, browser caching can be implemented easily.

It can be a pain to configure but the default options should work just fine if you’re not sure what to change. Also, make sure to enable gzip compression.

I am using the free version and have not found the need to buy the premium version which is quite pricey at US99 per year.

 

5. Use Google Mobile-Friendly Test to Make Sure Your Blog Is Mobile Friendly

Today, it’s more likely that the majority of all traffic that is coming to your website is  from mobile.

While there are exceptions to the rule such as for business-to-business (B2B) traffic, it’s not going to be that way forever.

So it’s still very important to make sure your blog looks good on mobile, that it is responsive and friendly on a mobile device.

So how do you go about in making your blog mobile friendly and responsive? The first step is to see how mobile friendly your blog is by using Google’s own tool that checks mobile friendliness.

Go to the Mobile-Friendly Test and enter your blog URL. Google will tell you whether or not your blog is mobile friendly.

So what should you do if your blog is not mobile friendly? You can hire a web designer to re-design your blog or website to make it mobile friendly.

If you are using WordPress, which you probably are if you are reading this post. You can download many free themes or purchase any of the premium themes.

I’ve purchased several premium WordPress themes online. One place I’d personally recommend for premium WordPress themes is Theme Forest. They have a pretty good selection of high-quality and good looking themes.

Just be sure that when making your purchase, the theme is responsive and mobile friendly.

Currently I am using the FocusBlog Theme by Thrive Themes.

 

Conclusion

Now that you have read my SEO tips for beginners. It’s time to take action.

Implementing any of these tips ensures your blog or website is built on a strong foundation before you start creating even more thorough content or acquiring backlinks.

These are high impact SEO strategies which means they will affect your Google search rankings in a big way. So whether you are a beginner or an experienced blogger, give them a try.

Please leave a comment or share this post if you find it useful. Thanks for reading!