4 Blogging Tips to Make Money

The best source of free traffic for any online business is Search Engine. Period!

I know you are going to tell me you do well pulling traffic from Pinterest. I agree Pinterest traffic is great. But do you know Pinterest has fast become a search engine powered by pins? So it won’t be wrong to mention that a huge part of its traffic is search.

The search engine industry has greatly evolved with the main ranking factors being Content, Backlinks and Rankbrain.

While Content and Backlinks are competing for the first position on the ranking list, RankBrain is the third. But from my experience, RankBrain has a huge influence on both.

People can play tricks with links, do some blackhat offpage SEO to rank with some crappy content. But user behavior will trigger poor quality signals to RankBrain. The result will be a shift downward despite the links. That’s RankBrain at work.

Some of manipulative exercises some folks do to squeeze their ways up to page #1 is buying backlinks. While this is recommended and practiced by some marketers and SEO experts against Google’s official position, I do not vote for it.

A guest author on my blog has published on buying backlinks, why you should and why you shouldn’t. Check out that post and let me know what you think.

Do these things to  increase your search engine traffic

Ok let me give you some useful points that will help boost your search engine traffic all the times.

1 – Focus on content for readers

I don’t know what you believe but proof has shown that quality content remains a big ranking factor. Google is all about delivering satisfaction to its users. And through Rankbrain artificial intelligence, there are many quality signals Google uses to determine the quality of your content.

While post length is a pointer to a great content, not all long articles are in-depth. Some short posts have proven to do well in search than longer ones on the same topic. This brings us to the next point.

2 – Pay attention to Semantics

Semantic SEO is the hot piece of cake in the industry today. It’s simply about what’s really behind a certain keyword. What’s someone looking for when searching for “best hotels in Texas ” ?

Is the searcher looking for an article that says “hotel X is the best hostel in Texas” or is he looking for a blog post that lists “Top 10 five star hotels in Texas” ?

What is the search intent behind this seemingly common keyword? That’s the question Semantic SEO seeks to answer. I have written on Semantic SEO on my blog. I look forward to knowing what you think.

3 – Build or earn backlinks

As you create great content for your readers with semantics in mind, you need to boost your rankings by getting backlinks from quality blogs. This is part of Off page SEO.

Top content that meets the intent of searchers and solves problems will definitely attract backlinks from your community. But you can step out to carry out actions that point more relevant links to your blog. Some or these are:

• Guest posting: A lot has been said about guest posting for backlinks. But I see it differently. Though it evidently increases your backlinks, have the focus to connect and build relationships using it as a tool. When you submit your great content to other bloggers and engage with them, you stand a chance of getting more backlinks from them not only from your guest article but from other posts. Ryan, the guy blogging from paradise is a machine in this.
• Blog commenting: Though links from blog comments have lost a bit of their values, they are not completely useless. While blog commenting on relevant blogs build (mostly nofollow) links, they get you connected with different bloggers who eventually will discover your content and link to.
• Buy Backlinks: Do this at your risk. But if you must go by this track, avoid buying from platforms like Fiverr. A good way to go about it is pay genuine bloggers who create content on other blogs and give you a link from each post they publish.

If you want more about Off page SEO, you may want to take a look at this SEO post by Anil Agarwal 

4 – Publish on less competitive topics

One of the reasons folks find it hard to rank is tough competition. If you want to compete with search listings that have extremely high SEO competitor matrices, you should be ready to face tough times.

According to Ubersuggest, the keyword SEO has a difficulty of 74. Finding your way to page one for this keyword is said to be HARD.

If you must create content on the keyword, do a bit of digging to find a narrow niche with low competition. Generally, for such long tail low competitive keywords, search volume will be relatively low. But that’s worth it all as you are targeting a group of searchers who are near taking required action.

Ok let’s narrow it down to “SEO tips for bloggers”

This makes a lot of sense to me and any SEO baby can easily rank for it with a bit of work. But we are not going to end at this level.

According to this tool, there are 7 competitors ranking on Google page #1 for this keyword phrase. But how tough are these competitors.

Now, Google SERP has 10 natural entries. 7 of these 10 have been occupied by content creators who want the same thing as you. But how tough are they?

Though we have few entries to compete against, these are difficult competitors given their domain score. Looking at the estimated number of monthly visits these entries get for this keyword, you should be asking yourself if it’s worth your.

5 – What about broken links method?

This involves scanning the web and looking for broken links on websites in your niche. Then pitching the site owners with a friendly request to replace the broken links with some relevant page on your blog.

But sincerely, while this seems to work, I get tired of these link replacement pitches. The point is some even ask you to replace links that ain’t broken because they feel theirs is more in-depth and meaty.

But all in all, is this something to still try in 2019 for link building?

I will give a YES to that question. But you must have something quite impressive and a very outstanding pitch to get the attention of many content creators these days.

6 – Internal linking really work

They are important because they help search engines with a better understanding of your site. If you have a large number of posts on related topics, search engines may get confused which to rank.

But you can guide them by properly linking from other pages within your blog to the one page you want ranked.  Without a proper internal linking practice, you may loose on ranking or compete against yourself on SERP.

One more thing about Internal link is the anchor text. Unlike external links where over-optimization or keyword-rich links may attract penalties, internal links should be keyword optimized as this helps both search engines and users clicking through.

Wrapping up

I appreciate you reading this post. Drop a comment let me know what you think about increasing search engine traffic to your blog