ShoutMeLoud receives about 1 Million+ page views a month, and 82% of our traffic is from search engine. It didn’t happen in a day, and here I’m sharing strategies which I use to make ShoutMeLoud SEO friendly.
Tools which I use to help in SEO
It would be unwise for me to not mention the tools which are helping me to achieve this goal.
- Genesis Theme: The ShoutMeLoud theme is powered by Genesis Framework. It’s a great framework which is 100% SEO optimized. Period.
- SEO by Yoast: The plugin which takes care of On-page, On-site SEO & Social SEO.
- Kinsta Hosting: Managed hosting which I use for making my blog load within 1 seconds. A cheaper alternative is optimized WordPress hosting by Hostgator.
- SEMRUSH: Helps me in Keyword research & monitoring my search engine ranking.
SEO is an on-going process, and it’s done on many levels. Here at ShoutMeLoud, I use WordPress as a platform for blogging, and we all know by default WordPress is not SEO friendly. Though, there are easy fixes which make a WordPress blog search engine friendly. Though, you can’t achieve a search engine friendly Website just with the help of plugins, as there are many factors which help in proper SEO optimization of a website. Today, I will be sharing few tips and ideas, which I use to make ShoutMeLoud SEO friendly.
If you know, ShoutMeLoud got affected by Google Panda algorithm, and within six months I made 80% recovery. In this process, I learned many new SEO tricks, and you can learn few of them by reading my earlier article on how to recover from Panda effect. Getting back to the topic, SEO happens at 4 level:
- On Page SEO
- On Site SEO
- Off-site SEO
- Social SEO
On page SEO and On-site SEO, are something that anyone can take care with a bit of SEO knowledge, and most of them can be achieved with the help of plugins.
When I started this blog (ShoutMeLoud) , I never considered SEO optimization. After a while, I started reading about SEO and understand that SEO plays a major role to drive traffic.
Even your blog has more than 10,000 subscribers but after a while, Organic traffic (traffic from search engines) will be the major traffic source for your blog. Right now we receive almost 12K unique visits daily, and most of the traffic is from search engines. I will be explaining the complete process below, and if you have any questions, feel free to ask me via comments:
SEO starts at Content level:
First and foremost your content is the real SEO. Every first of the month, I lay down content strategy for the complete month, and this starts from researching the keywords. I analyze few of the sites in the similar niche and pick keywords which fit best for ShoutMeLoud audience. I use tools like Google Keyword planner tool & SEMRUSH to find all such content.
Keywords play a major role in search engine optimization, and one should always optimize their blog title, description, and keyword tags. You should read my post on Importance of Keyword for Search engine optimization
Once I have the content ideas ready with me, it’s time to write content that is not the only quality article, but also targeted for the certain keyword.
- Read: How to write SEO optimized content in WordPress
To add SEO details like Meta Title, Meta description, you can use the plugin like WordPress SEO by Yoast.
Image SEO
For images, I use SEO friendly images plugin to add Image ALT tag, and SMUSH.it plugin to reduce the size of my images.
Keyword optimization plays a great role to get traffic from search engines and have better ranking in the search results.
When I was new with WordPress, I was unaware of the usage of categories, and I created lot of categories. Another big mistake that I did with categories was: using more than one category for the single post. This increased the chance of post duplication. After realizing the importance of category, I changed my permalinks and started using one category per post. I also started using relevant tags to show related articles effectively.
Though I have already made mistakes by putting more than one category for the single post, and the best way to get out of it is making my categories Noindex, I added noindex tags to my category and tags archive. Also, to other archives like date-based archive, author archive. This also helped me remove pages which are not intended for search-engine, as categories, tags pages are for your readers to navigate your blog more effectively.
Another useful stuff that I got to know recently is using anchor text to link back to your article.
- Why should you link back to your article and anchor text technique?
Alternatively, use any related post plugin to link back to your old article. There are many SEO plugins and strategy I use to optimize my WordPress blog for search engine and readers. I will be covering most of them in upcoming posts.
Meanwhile, I will love to know your strategy on optimizing your blog for the search engine?
Here are a few hand-picked guides for you level up your SEO game:
- What’s The Optimum Keyword Density for Better Ranking?
- How To Noindex WordPress Categories and Tags
- How To Show Different Post Titles To Readers And Search Engines
- List of Stop Words for SEO
ShoutMeLoud receives about 1 Million+ page views a month, and 82% of our traffic is from search engine. It didn’t happen in a day, and here I’m sharing strategies which I use to make ShoutMeLoud SEO friendly.
Tools which I use to help in SEO
It would be unwise for me to not mention the tools which are helping me to achieve this goal.
SEO is an on-going process, and it’s done on many levels. Here at ShoutMeLoud, I use WordPress as a platform for blogging, and we all know by default WordPress is not SEO friendly. Though, there are easy fixes which make a WordPress blog search engine friendly. Though, you can’t achieve a search engine friendly Website just with the help of plugins, as there are many factors which help in proper SEO optimization of a website. Today, I will be sharing few tips and ideas, which I use to make ShoutMeLoud SEO friendly.
If you know, ShoutMeLoud got affected by Google Panda algorithm, and within six months I made 80% recovery. In this process, I learned many new SEO tricks, and you can learn few of them by reading my earlier article on how to recover from Panda effect. Getting back to the topic, SEO happens at 4 level:
On page SEO and On-site SEO, are something that anyone can take care with a bit of SEO knowledge, and most of them can be achieved with the help of plugins.
When I started this blog (ShoutMeLoud) , I never considered SEO optimization. After a while, I started reading about SEO and understand that SEO plays a major role to drive traffic.
Even your blog has more than 10,000 subscribers but after a while, Organic traffic (traffic from search engines) will be the major traffic source for your blog. Right now we receive almost 12K unique visits daily, and most of the traffic is from search engines. I will be explaining the complete process below, and if you have any questions, feel free to ask me via comments:
SEO starts at Content level:
First and foremost your content is the real SEO. Every first of the month, I lay down content strategy for the complete month, and this starts from researching the keywords. I analyze few of the sites in the similar niche and pick keywords which fit best for ShoutMeLoud audience. I use tools like Google Keyword planner tool & SEMRUSH to find all such content.
Keywords play a major role in search engine optimization, and one should always optimize their blog title, description, and keyword tags. You should read my post on Importance of Keyword for Search engine optimization
Once I have the content ideas ready with me, it’s time to write content that is not the only quality article, but also targeted for the certain keyword.
To add SEO details like Meta Title, Meta description, you can use the plugin like WordPress SEO by Yoast.
Image SEO
For images, I use SEO friendly images plugin to add Image ALT tag, and SMUSH.it plugin to reduce the size of my images.
Keyword optimization plays a great role to get traffic from search engines and have better ranking in the search results.
When I was new with WordPress, I was unaware of the usage of categories, and I created lot of categories. Another big mistake that I did with categories was: using more than one category for the single post. This increased the chance of post duplication. After realizing the importance of category, I changed my permalinks and started using one category per post. I also started using relevant tags to show related articles effectively.
Though I have already made mistakes by putting more than one category for the single post, and the best way to get out of it is making my categories Noindex, I added noindex tags to my category and tags archive. Also, to other archives like date-based archive, author archive. This also helped me remove pages which are not intended for search-engine, as categories, tags pages are for your readers to navigate your blog more effectively.
Another useful stuff that I got to know recently is using anchor text to link back to your article.
Alternatively, use any related post plugin to link back to your old article. There are many SEO plugins and strategy I use to optimize my WordPress blog for search engine and readers. I will be covering most of them in upcoming posts.
Meanwhile, I will love to know your strategy on optimizing your blog for the search engine?
Here are a few hand-picked guides for you level up your SEO game:
Subscribe on Youtube
Like this:
Support