Following my previous post how do blogs make money I talked about the 5 most important factors for driving traffic. Quality and quantity will come from consistently creating more blog posts, so the next important factor is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
I’d dabbled with Etsy shops before and heard the term SEO thrown around a lot, but I never fully understood what it actually meant. Now I understand that it’s essentially the practice of making your website or product more visible online, by improving your ranking positions on search engines, such as Google and social media platforms.
There are 3 main components of SEO:
Technical Optimisation – This is your website’s crawlability and indexability for search engines. In other words, it’s how Google finds you and whether your site is trustworthy. A technically optimised site loads quickly, is mobile-friendly, has clean code, proper site structure, secure HTTPS, and no major errors that could prevent pages from being indexed or well ranked.
On Page Optimisation – This relates directly to your content and it focuses on both the quality of your content and how well it matches what people are searching for. This includes the quality of content itself, titles, headings, meta descriptions, URLs , keywords, etc. It’s all about creating the best possible experience ufor your visitors while clearly signalling to Google what each page is about.
Off Page Optimisation – As it says on the tin, everything that is done off your website. This primarily includes building backlinks and earning mentions or signals from external sources (e.g., being featured in a YouTube video, cited in articles, or mentioned on social media).
As for trying to improve the SEO on my blog, I knew WordPress had an SEO plugin called Yoast, but I was unsure how to use it. Luckily, I found this really helpful YouTube tutorial that showed me how to set it up and make the most of all its features:
Most sections of the tutorial were easy to follow; however, I had a lot of trouble trying to verify my site with Google Search Console.
I followed the recommendations in both Ferdy’s tutorial and the Bluehost guide; https://www.bluehost.com/blog/how-to-submit-your-website-to-search-engines/?channelid=P99C100S1N0B3003A151D115E0000V112&utm_source=%2Fwp-admin%2F&utm_medium=bluehost_plugin but I kept getting the same error message.
I ended up spending the best part of 3 hours trying to figure this out and was pretty frustrated, bearing in mind how little time I have to dedicate to my blog. I decided to call it a day, sleep on it and review it in the morning.
Sleep was a good idea…I’d been an absolute numpty 😂. The reason it wasn’t working was because I hadn’t gone live with my website yet, so obviously there was nothing for Google to find. All I had to do was click”go live” on the Bluehost dashboard and everything worked as shown in Ferdy’s video….yay!!! Hopefully you can learn from my silly mistake.
Linking my website to Bing was a lot easier, as all I needed to do was click on this link:
It then enabled me to setup using the information from Google Search Console, avoiding the need to refill all the Bing fields.
Next was Pinterest – and for me, this is probably the most important platform because it’s where I find the most side hustles ideas. So I really need to be posting my content there to attract my own readers. First, I needed to set up a business account (I didn’t want my blog linked to my personal account for privacy reasons). After that, it was easy to connect everything with Yoast, and it worked exactly as Ferdy showed in his video.
Going forward I believe the majority of techincal optimisation settings are now set. To help with everyday on-page optimisation while writing a blog post, the Yoast plugin offers great guidance whilst writing posts – it checks that the post is as well-optimised as possible and suggests further improvements. While I’m writing this post, Yoast is currently showing the post as red, so I obviously need to make a number of improvements (which is understandable, bearing in mind it’s not finished yet). Below is an example of some of the issues:
Ferdy’s tutorial covers exactly how to implement most of these suggestions, and I highly recommend watching it.
I think Ferdy’s and Bluehost’s tutorials have given me a much better understanding of technical and on-page optimisation (for now – I’m aware blog posts need to be continually updated). However, to really make the most of off-page optimisation, this is where I need to start building social media accounts and creating posts/images related to my blog that can be shared and drive traffic. I’ll cover more on this in future blog posts.
