How to get both people and search engines to read your blog

Your blog won’t have much of an existence if you don’t get any visitors, both human (your readers) and robot (the search engines) to read your blog.

This is a problem for new bloggers, as it takes time to get established within the blogosphere, even for some blogging veterans who haven’t quite grasped what blogging is about, and believe me, I have met some of those over the years.

Change the way you think

Blogging is a personal occupation, so it is quite normal to get possessive over it. But if you want to encourage others to visit and read your blog, you need to stop concentrating on yourself and start thinking like your readers.

Does your niche stimulate enough interest? Do you know enough information to write good value-added posts? Are you investigating further into your readers’ problems and aspirations? Do your posts provide appropriate solutions and recognisable benefits?

Get conversational

That’s of course for the human readers, and it’s important to adapt your writing into a conversational style, or as if you are telling a story. Write your post as a transcription of your conversation, or imagine talking to your best friend on the phone. This produces a friendly, approachable piece of writing that flows better and therefore becomes easier, and quicker, to read. (And in a time hungry world, that is important!)

Search engine spiders are different. They don’t respond like humans, but they are getting cleverer as the algorithms (mathematical applications controlling the search mechanisms) start to improve and work around certain criteria, like interaction on social media (conversations and popularity) and analysing questions within search prompts (as in Hummingbird). You can also help them along by using elements such as keywords and special SEO plugins that are designed to assist the search engines.

Find a good keyword

Keyword usage keeps changing, so sometimes it’s hard to keep up. At the moment just think what your readers would like to read about, find a good keyword, preferably within a string of words (this is known as long-tail) and even better within a question someone might ask in SIRI, for example, and use that as part or all of your blog’s headline (and in the first paragraph for extra impact!).

Headlines are sometimes far more difficult to write than the rest of the post, even really famous and successful bloggers agonise over their headlines, so a tip is to incorporate a how-to question or think of a statement that is on trend or will appeal to your readers’ fears, lack of knowledge or immediate desires.

Get sociable

Sharing stuff is important to gain like, know and trust from your readers, whether they regularly read your blog or are just passing through. Being altruistic and leaving valuable and content-worthy comments on other blogs, retweeting or reblogging their posts, providing quality information that would improve their lives and engaging extensively on social media, regardless if it is of interest to you, will draw in the right kind of attention and get more people to read your blog.

And that’s just for the humans; to encourage robot activity make sure the links you leave behind are relevant and go to an appropriate destination, you are visible practically everywhere without over saturation, and you don’t duplicate or dump your content on the web.

Avoid automation

Engagement encourages other algorithms, as in Facebook, to take notice of you. A tip here is to try not to automate your feeds into social media that have, what I call, long-term updates (such as Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Google Plus), but to paste them in manually (even if you do it in multiple areas).

The next important step is to provide a suitably persuasive and conversational introduction to your blog post’s link, as people will respond better to personal and highly relevant input. Also deleting the automatically generated image underneath the link will increase your reach to newer readers. All this may be time consuming, but worth it, as the results are certainly beneficial.

If you want to know more, most of this subject will be covered in my next learning video delivered on Friday 29 November, and I shall be writing an ebook to accompany this as well.

About Alice Elliott

Alice Elliott, aka Fairy Blog Mother, is an award winning blogging consultant who has been looking after bloggers since 2006! Woah, that's a long time! She specialises in "explaining things really simply" about WordPress, and has twice been noted as a top WordPress influencer for 2019.

• Mail
|
• Web
|
• Twitter
|
• Facebook
|
• YouTube
|
• More Posts(40)