Dear Kalena…
How can I make my blog searchable and rank well on search engines? How long on average does it take a new blog site to receive good traffic?
Thanks
Priscilla
Hi Priscilla
My first piece of advice would be to host your blog on your own domain name and not with any of the many free hosted platforms such as blogger.com, wordpress.com etc. This serves two purposes:
- You gain maximum SEO potential from all inbound links you receive as they’re pointing to your site and not helping improve the authority of the main root domain that you’re blog is associated with.
- If you decide to move things around, you have full control over how the pages redirect and can ensure no previously built inbound links go to waste if/when changes are made.
Once you have your own domain and hosting account to house it, the next big thing is having search engine friendly blog software. I personally use WordPress as it’s one of the most popular and even without adding any plugins, it has some really good SEO features built-in. It’s also really easy to extend and add widgets / plugins to make it even better.
Put together a blog schedule to ensure you’re consistent with your posts – it could be daily, weekly, monthly or whatever works-out best for you. You could even set aside a day a week to prepare posts and write a few in one sitting then schedule them to go live at different intervals. Regardless of how often you blog, it’s essential to make blogging part of your routine as it’s very easy to let other things get in the way and before you know it, you haven’t posted anything for a couple of months.
While having great content is crucial, you will still find that it often isn’t enough to drive traffic, so the next step is to get your name out there. Comment on other relevant blogs, offer to guest post, participate in blog carnivals, promote your blog using other social media tools like Twitter and look for as many opportunities you can find to let people know you exist.
A new blog post can be indexed in minutes, but proper traffic and subscribers takes time to build.
If you’re serious about creating a successful blog, I’d also suggest checking-out ProBlogger as he provides a tonne of great advice.
Hope this helps!
Peter Newsome
SiteMost SEO Brisbane
