Whether you are new to blogging or have been blogging for a good while now, these SEO tips for bloggers are definitely worth considering if you want to build traffic to your site or blog in 2023.

1. Quality Content is Still King

The sheer importance of focusing on high-quality content for developing the SEO value of your site is emphasized by the Blogging Wizard. Producing great quality content, as he points out, is beneficial because:

Producing the best content around, you will also get more social shares, more comments, more email subscribers and more links.

Blogging Wizard

Think about it as a user yourself!

There is so much rubbish online that when you come across something that really helps you or teaches you something useful, and that is informative and interesting, what will you do?

You are much more likely to react positively to great content and you might well bookmark that great post, save it somewhere, share it, and so on.

Great content that you take time to write and that genuinely helps your readers is always going to get you better SEO results than content written just for the sake of being able to publish something.

ACTION: When writing your next blog post, focus on quality rather than quantity. Aim for + 1000 words. Provide genuinely useful information in the post that will engage the reader.

2. Understand User-Intent to Get Better SEO Results

If you really want to increase the amount of traffic and visitors you get to your blog posts and other pages, you really need to understand user intent.

If you do not have time to watch the video above, let me conclude quite briefly what user intent in SEO is all about and how to quickly evaluate it.

Just do a Google search for a term related to your niche and look at the top 10 results in Google!

What types of results do Google list for that term in their top 10?

If you write about careers for moms, search for ‘careers for moms’, for example. If you blog about being a freelance trainer, search by the term ‘freelance trainers’.

Or search by ‘lemon tea’ if you write about health. Choose a fairly generic term to start with.

You will note that there are quite specific types of results that will be in the top 10.

So, if I do a google search for the term ‘lemon tea’ I (and you will see similar results but they vary slightly according to your geographic location) that for lemon tea the results can be broken down into roughly:

• 50% are recipes and how to make lemon tea.
• 20% are retail
• 30% are health benefits of lemon tea.

Once you understand what types of results Google will place in the top 10 for your search term, you can THEN tailor the content you write to fit into the content types that Google looks to place in the top 10.

If you were planning an article on lemon tea, you might want then to focus on writing about the top 10 health benefits of drinking lemon tea, for example!

ACTION: Before writing your next blog post, do a search to assess the user intent for that term or expression you plan to write about it. Google the term and analyze the top 10 search results for that term and assess what types of results Google rank.

3. Focus on Long-Tail Terms for SEO Results

Whilst it would be great to rank for a one-word or two-word term relevant to your chosen niche, it is often extremely hard to do so, as an individual blogger or small business.

Can you imagine how much money it would take to rank for the word ‘car’ or ‘make-up’.

You might need to invest a huge amount of time and effort to get the backlinks and coverage to rank high for one-word and some two-word terms.

So what is the solution for us, small business owners?

The answer, as Blog tyrant explains, is to use long-tail terms!

One of the best SEO tips for bloggers is to focus on 3, 4 or 5-word terms and expressions, to grab niche traffic.

And through ranking for these specific terms and for lots of them, you can actually get some really high levels of traffic to your website or blog.

Consider this also though. If you target a 4-word term then you might also, over time, begin to rank for one or two words from that term.

Let me give you an example.

Say you build a blog post and target the term “buy corporate training materials‘ because you sell training materials online.

So you write a blog post to do with ‘buying training materials’ and you SEO the page by including the 4-word term in the content, put it in the meta tags, and so on.

Over time, you might find that you also start to rank for all of these terms below, as they are all included in the 4-word term:

• buy corporate training materials
• corporate training materials
• buy training materials
• training materials
• training

Why Targetting Long-tail Terms Can Work Well

By trying to rank for longer terms you will, in essence, have less competition for that term.

Many people might write about training (including fitness training and corporate training, for example). But how many people will write an article on how to buy corporate training materials?

ACTION: If you are a small business, think of and maybe list a bunch of long-tail terms that relate to your niche, that you would like to rank for. Use 3, 4, and 5-word terms. Then begin writing a blog post aimed at each term. To find the best long-tail terms AHrefs is one of the best tools on the market.

4. Adding Internal Links

The importance of adding internal links is often underestimated by bloggers with respect to the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) benefits.

A lot of bloggers, when thinking about SEO, automatically focus heavily on backlinks, and understandably so. Getting others to link to your site shows Google that your site is important.

But what about internal links? Why are they so useful for SEO?

Internal links achieve three key things:

• They help search engines understand the structure of your site, i.e. how things inter-relate, and it shows that there is a solid theme and a certain natural connectivity between your various posts.
• It helps to reduce the bounce rate if you can keep people on your site and send them to various posts on your site and keep them reading your content.
• It is great for the user experience (UX) if they can easily follow related posts to things they are reading and take interest in.

If you have a solid theme for your site and have content and posts that naturally fit within the theme, then making sure that you include at least 2 links to other pages on your site in new posts you write will be easy peasy!

ACTION: Make sure that you include at least 2 links in the next blog post that you write, to other pages on your site. You may also want to go through old posts and make sure you have at least 2 inner links in each post.

5. Evergreen Content

Have you ever visited a website and come across content that is clearly out-of-date and no longer relevant? What do you then do? Probably leave the site right?

Evergreen content, as Hubspot explains, is great for SEO and blogging because this is content that is dateless, meaning it is always relevant.

If the content you write stays relevant, then it is good in terms of retaining the reader (avoids higher bounce rates).

ACTION: Try and focus on writing content that will NOT be out-of-date within a few weeks or months. Also, make a point to update old posts once a year.

6. Use Headings Correctly

With the latest version of WordPress, checking the headings you have used to improve the SEO value of your posts has become that much easier.

You just have to click the ‘i’ button (in a circle) you will see on the top left as you are writing a blog post in WordPress and it shows you the exact structure of your posts.

See mine below from writing this post up to this point.

Headings are important for SEO because Google and other search engines can see, from the headings, the exact intention of the post you have written.

These headings, in other words, act to help Google decide exactly what your post is about and this helps guide them on what searches to rank you in (of course it is only one factor but it is an important one in SEO).

ACTION: When you write your next blog post, make sure you correctly structure the post. Make sure you include at least four Header 2 tags.

7. Using Outbound Links to Piggyback Competitors

One of the most underutilized SEO blogging methods is making correct use of outbound links!

Why focus on linking out to other people’s sites when we, in fact, want to get links pointing into our own site (backlinks)? That is a fair question to ask.

Let me explain: Outbound links (i.e. links in your posts to other people’s sites) inform Google of what your post is about i.e. what it is related to.

So if you are writing a post on holidays in Finland, it would be very natural to link to the Finnish tourist boards, to local hotels you recommend, and to the local attractions. It would be logical.

When you link out, you are in effect benefitting from what is known as piggyback marketing.

Piggyback marketing is when you benefit off the back of someone else. In this case, you link to 5 or 10 Finland websites and Google then clearly knows that your blog post really and clearly is about Finland. This helps Google truly understand what your post is about.

You then begin to be also seen as an authority on Finland through providing quality information about Finland.

ACTION: Make sure that you include at least two outbound links to related sites in each blog post you write. Ideally, link out to five or more. Also, do NOT be afraid sometimes to link to competitors.

8. Target the Correct Keywords

You can save a huge amount of time and effort towards your goal of driving much greater traffic to your blog, by targetting the correct keywords.

I have written long posts already on using keywords so let me direct you to two very useful posts on how to choose and use keywords in your blog posts, to get the maximum SEO benefit:

• How to choose the best keywords
• How to use keywords in blog posts

ACTION: I recommend reading the two blog posts mentioned above after reading this post.

9. Site Speed Is Important for SEO

Making sure that your site speed is good is becoming increasingly important!

If you have looked in your Google Analytics account lately to check your SEO stats then you might have noticed that there is a section of data from Google specifically about your site speed.

You can learn in detail about site speed in the post we recently did here.

ACTION: Plan a time to work on speeding up your website. It is actually very easy to make an instant big boost to your site speed with a tool such as the plug-in WP Rocket. Whatever you use, do not delay checking and, if needed, fixing your site speed.

10. Using Semantic Words

As WPbeginner highlights, making use of semantic words is also very important to maximize your SEO efforts. Semantic words are words that are logically related to another word or term.

If you were blogging about making chocolate in a blog post, for example, then Google would expect to see other words such as cocoa, sugar, and milk in the content, if the content is written well. There are certain words that you expect to see.

I went into a bit of detail on how to use keywords (including semantic words in the post on how to use keywords so make sure to check it out!