How to promote your blog 1: optimization for search engines

There are several to-do’s if your blog needs traffic from Yandex or other SERPs. Whatever the reason for your blog marketing (earn money, become famous, rule the world, etc.) and the mastery level of your writing skill, if you want popularity with the Russian search engines you have to meet their requirements. So, when writing for your blog, keep in mind you are not just having fun with words, but trying your best to impress both your readers (after all, you want to keep them coming back) and the search algorithms. Here are some ideas we use to reach good ranking in Yandex and Russian Google for our clients’ blogs. Most of these SEO tips we use for our clients’ websites as well.

SEO-write for your blog

Before writing a post, we check out the topic’s popularity in the search engines upon several quieries and make a list of keywords we need for a post. If a topic and the keywords are too popular perhaps we will need  to focus on something which is not, or write on the chosen topic with certain tips in mind.  What we need here is:

• to pick a low or medium frequency query for keyword placement
• to write a text with a reasonablel keywords density
• one or two major key words to be used in the title, H1-H3 headlines, in the first and the last paragraphs
• to enter the keywords into the «tags» list, ranging from the most to the least important, use them in the attributes «title» and «alt» in the <img> tag

What’s also really important for your blog marketing is regular writing something useful, interesting and appealing to the readers. The more frequently you post, the more likely Googlebot or Yandex robot will stop by on a more regular basis. What number of posts is optimal? It depends on how much time you have in stock for it or the needs of your business. On average we make 4 per month, but each week. If you have subscribers, they will get used to the regularity of your posts, so you’ll have to meet their expectations.

Optimize your blog platform for search engines

Blogs are most often run on ready-made platforms (WordPress, Joomla, Tilda, etc.) and if you care about your blog search ranking it needs SEO plugins or addons. What is crucially important is an opportunity to modify meta tags for your mainpage and posts, and have nicely laid URLs. Actually, most platforms offer now SEO opportunities and are SEO-friendly. We examine, install and adjust them into your blog, esp. if it runs on a non-standard platform.

Another problem is …design. Unfortunately for bloggers, not many blog designers and web-developers are SEO aware, meaning that the blog design you use could actually be hurting your search engine rankings. For example the code of a page can be overloaded with Java Script or widgets or other ‘useful’ but heavy stuff that slows down the robot’s work on indexing the content. So, while you may have an exclusivele original design that looks wonderful to readers, new readers might not find you if your blog isn’t ranking well organically in the search engines. Sometimes it is better to change the template than optimize the existing one.

Deal with comments

The main peculiarity of blog’s inner optimization is the commentary option. Comments can indicate the blog’s popularity but at the same time bring  our efforts to optimize a page to naught. Why is that?

Comments ‘water down’ the contents of the page and disrupt the keywords proportions. If your post is the one with good SEO and you want to get it linked back, you’d better publish it as a ‘page’ but not a ‘post’.  This issue is topical for WordPress and Blogger. Still if you want a post and comments, there’s a good tip: reply to every comment possible and use a couple of keywords in your replies! Of course, it is crucially important to delete irrelevant comments and spam.

Build backlinks to your blog

As for external links, take time to register in white site catalogues, buy links or promote your blog with articles or posts on social media. We advise to actively socialize wherever possible as you can express your opinion and place links with anchor text.

Backlinking methods include creating satellite blogs and cross-posting blogs. In the first case we start a bunch of minor blogs on a topic similar to that of the major one or on one of the subtopics of the major blog. This is easy with WordPress or Dzen. These blogs should be updated with unique or AI-helped generated content .  The satellites may link to the posts of the promoted blog, but the links’ anchors should consist of the target queries. Satellites may also be linked but not very densely – everything should look natural: Yandex as well as Google doesn’t seem to approve of rings or exessive linkage between sites. Cross posting serves the same purpose. For that you have to register a dozen or two blogs at the most popular services of ru-net. It’s better if you crosspost manually or half-automatically.

Manual crossposting: in 3-5 days after you’ve placed your post in the main blog, check if it was indexed by Google and Yandex. To do so, insert the title of the post and the address of the page into the search engine as a query. If it is in the index you will easily find it. As soon as you have found it, highlight a part of the original text and press Ctrl+V. Then link to the original material and make a post. Repeat the procedure at each crossposting blog. Each time refer to the original post.

It is advisable to develop your blogs for crossposting to attract more traffic. They can be updated with synonymized contentt with the keywords for further promotion. Alternatively, you can write intersting posts and make new friends (suitable fo LJ and Liveinternet.ru users). Turn your friends into traffic.

To be continued …

Done by Olli, allseo.ru and Vi