You have your website set up and you are happy with the theme you’ve chosen.

You’ve got your privacy pages and affiliate disclaimer pages posted and you have written your very first blog.

At this point you might be starting to wonder how anyone is going to see your work!

Do not worry my friend, our How To Get Traffic To A Blog [Online SEO Guide] will not only answer your question but give you 5 Tips on what to include on every blog you write as you build out your website.

For those who are really new, SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is what you do to your blogs, how you structure your content, how you optimize your page so that our friends the search engines (Google, Yahoo & Bing) will find your content and ranking it right up there on page 1 for the world to see.

I have written quite a bit about how to write quality content but there are a few crucial steps you need to be taking in every blog you post to make sure you have it optimized as well as possible.

Right ho, enough chat let’s get down to business

Keywords

I have another whole blog on choosing keywords so I am not going to go over that again here. This is a vitally important skill you need to master, so if you are unsure you can read all the info by clicking here.

Suffice to say when you are starting off in the world of blogging or affiliate marketing you need to use long tail keywords. These are keywords with smaller numbers of searches but also smaller numbers of competing websites.

You can have the best written, most engaging blog on the internet but if you are not on page 1 you are going to have a lot of trouble getting eyes on your content.

You’ve learnt how to choose a great long-tailed keyword – now what do you do with it?

It must be in the title, in the first few paragraphs of your content and then again at the end. And that is all.

Do not try to work the phrase into every paragraph or even anywhere else in your content. If it happens naturally that’s fine but if you use the exact phrase all through your content the search engines will see that as “keyword stuffing” and they don’t like it.

They are a lot cleverer than we give them credit for and they will know. It’s kinda seen as trying too hard!

Your blog may also get ranked for other keywords that you didn’t intend. So this blog is about increasing traffic and using SEO to do so. Through the use of various words which come naturally to explaining how you do this, I may get this blog ranked for say “how to choose a great long-tailed keyword” (I have highlighted the first time I use it in bold above). I did not deliberately use that phrase but as it is in my content Google may pick it up as a keyword.

So through the course of just writing great informative content you may end up with many keywords. It is not good practice to use keyword stuffing, those days are long gone. It will ruin your content as it will come across as staged and unnatural to your reader, and it won’t do you any favours with the search engines anyway.

Choose a great long-tailed keyword, use it in the title and the first and last paragraphs only.

A great graphic

You will notice that all my blogs have a great graphic or image right up at the start. This is to catch the reader’s attention.

It will appear above the fold, which is SEO speak for on the first screen that appears, so you don’t need to scroll down to see the graphic, it’s right there.

This helps with reader retention. If you happen upon a web page and it’s just a big block of text, most of us will immediately think “too hard” and move on. We are a fickle bunch like that. And this ruins your bounce rate and dwell time. Both of which are important to keeping your ranking within the search engines.

So use an image above the fold to hold your reader’s attention.

By using an enticing graphic above the fold, studies have shown that you will increase the chance of your blog being shared on social media by 80%. Once again more shares mean more traffic for you.

You can use a free program like Canva to create beautiful graphics, no design skills needed as the templates are all provided for you. A word of warning though, it is quite addictive once you start, so be prepared to waste a bit of time looking around in there.

There are also lots of websites providing copyright free image so you don’t need to rely on your own photography skills. I like Pixabay but there are heaps of others.

Shameless self-promotion – internal links

I know this one may be difficult when you first start as you don’t have too many blogs of your own to be able to link too. An internal link is simply a link to another post or page on your own website.

You will find as you build out your site there are lots of opportunities for you to insert an internal link in your blogs. I have already done this above when I referred to the other article I have on choosing keywords.

Once again I didn’t do this deliberately, it was correct in terms of the information I want to give you on SEO optimization and it also provides an opportunity for an internal link.

I usually finish writing my article and then go back through it looking for opportunities to insert both internal and external links (we will talk about external shortly). If you are writing content that is tailored to your niche, many of the articles will relate to each other and you will often have an article further explaining your topic.

You may need to elaborate on the sentence to make inserting the link feel natural. If you need to do that to get the link in there, well then do it.

Once you have say 10 or more blogs on your site it is well worth going back and putting internal links on all your existing blogs and then just keep flowing it through as you create new content.

Provide the best info for your reader’s – external links

As you might have guessed already this is a link to a page or post on a site external to yours. You should have at least one of these external links per blog, and many SEO experts are now saying you should have at least 3.

WHAT!! You want me to give my visitors’ an opportunity to leave my site!! Ummm no, I’m not going to do that, that just seems silly.

I know, hang in there with me and I’ll explain why.

External links position your site as a hub of information. And Google’s algorithm “Hilltop” loves to promote sites that are hubs. It makes sense, Google wants to promote the very best information to its searchers.

If your content is substantial and has lots of links out to even more relevant information then Uncle G will rank your page higher in the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Page).

External links have what is known as link juice. Link juice helps show Google that you have relationships with external sites.

Your link must be to a reputable site with a higher Domain Authority than yours. The content you link to must be relevant to your blog and for your reader’s sake relevant to what you are talking about immediately prior to providing the link.

You would obviously not link to a sales page of a competitor selling the very product you have been blogging about but a link to Wikipedia, as an example, for more information would be sufficient.

I am also going to provide you with a link to a fantastic site called Backlinko. Brian Dean is one of my online mentors and I highly recommend you check out his site for additional information on SEO for your website – once you’ve finished here of course!

Which reminds me, affiliate links out to your affiliate product or partner are not considered external links, so don’t count those when you are thinking have I provided an external link in this blog.

External links back to your site have been shown to be the biggest factor in ranking your site, and a link back to your site from a reputable niche site has fantastic link juice. So if you can encourage other sites to link back to yours (obviously sites within your niche and good quality sites) you will also boost your ranking status.

In the biz we call these backlinks.

Moving pictures – use of video

Another great SEO technique is to include a video in your blogs. Don’t panic you don’t need to suddenly become a movie star and create your own feature-length movies. Actually anyone’s videos will do, you guessed it as long as they are relevant to your content, fit within the context of your blog and provide value to your readers.

You Tube videos are gold for this. If the video provides you with an embed code, then the publisher is OK for you to use it on your site. More often than not you can find a really great video that will explain exactly what you are talking about, and you don’t need to create it yourself.

Having said that down the track once your site is ticking along nicely, it might be worth investing in creating your own videos for You Tube and your site. You might notice more often than not in the search results, up high on the page will be a few You Tube videos. If you create our own you could be one of them.

But back to the use of videos in your blogs. Once again it shows Uncle G that your site is a hub of information. Plus from a visitors’ perspective if you can provide a video that adds value to what they have been reading then they are more likely to stay a little longer and view it.

Below is Brian providing a few extra tips and elaborating on some areas I have already explained. Did I mention Brian is the Master of SEO give yourself a few minutes break and watch Brian at work.

SEO in Summary

Search Engine Optimization is crucial to your success. We have only touched on the very basics of how to get traffic to a blog, but if you include these tips in every blog you will be way ahead of your competitors.

I hope you enjoyed the first article in our Online SEO Guide. I will be elaborating on many of the aspects of SEO as I continue to provide quality advice, tips and tricks for you to succeed in the affiliate marketing business.

I have recently completed the Ultimate How To Affiliate Marketing Guide which is chock full of even more information – you can check that out by clicking the button below.