WordPress SEO - 7 Strategies To Boost The Blog Traffic | Free and Premium WordPress Plugins and Themes from WpDevArt

WordPress website SEO is very important. Today we will check 7 strategies to boost your WordPress blog traffic. Are you tired of reading SEO strategies that confuse you? Have you tried a lot of bad SEO advice with zero results? We understand! As a blogger, you want to write more content, not perform the job of an SEO professional.

Most SEO strategies that you read today require SEO expertise, time or expensive tools. But we have good news. We have for you 7 SEO strategies that you can use on your WordPress blog even if you have no SEO skills. The best part? They are all actionable and you can start using them immediately.

Here they are.

1. Write Long Form Content For Your WordPress Blog

Every savvy blogger knows that content length is an important ranking factor. There have been many studies done to measure the impact of long form content on rankings. And they all conclude the same thing. Long form content ranks higher in search results. Long form content not only ranks higher, but attracts more links as well. A study by SERP IQ found that content close to 2400 words tend to rank higher in search. Moz also revealed in a case study that longer content ranked higher in search. Here is how they analyzed the content of their own blog –

First, they plotted the content length of their posts on a graph.
Then they plotted the number of links their posts received.

As you see, there is a strong co-relation between the content length and the number of links the posts received. So, based on the above findings, should you write content that is almost 2500 words? Not so fast. The thing that maybe you missed is that both these studies were done in 2012. If you remember, Google makes over 500 tweaks to its algorithm each year. That means research just 6 months old should be taken with a grain of salt. So what advice should you follow? Well, there is a simple technique to know what advice you should follow (check the Best WordPress SEO Plugins list).

We call it ‘Follow the Money’ technique. This is a common term used in the personal finance industry. It means that you follow what other successful guys are doing. In the blogging world, it would mean that you pick the top bloggers in the industry. Then follow what WordPress SEO best practices are they following.

An example of that would be Neil Patel. Neil Patel is a well known marketer, blogger and consultant. He has 2 blogs, Quick Sprout and NeilPatel.com. Neil is a marketing consultant and has worked with many large companies on their SEO. It is safe to assume that Neil pays attention to emerging SEO practices. If you look at Neil’s blogs from an SEO perspective, there are few things that stand out:

Content Length
- Neil has been upping the content length for the past few months. Most new posts are now over 3500 words long.
Use Of Data
- Neil uses a lot of data in his posts. The data is always from authoritative sources in the industry.
Use Of Images
- Neil uses a lot of images in his posts. These images are usually graphs, charts or screenshots.
Internal Linking
- Neil links to many of his own posts with no special anchor text.
Outbound Links
- Neil links to a lot of other websites in his posts with no specific anchor text. The anchor text is also usually longer than 3 characters.
Content Quality
- Neil writes in depth, quality and actionable content backed by research and data

Based on the above observations, you can conclude that Neil is preparing for the future. A few years ago it was easy to rank in Google by writing crappy 400 word articles. Google kept improving and the barrier to entry in the top 10 results became bigger. Today, the average content length in the top 10 results is over 2000 words. But what about the future? If everyone writes 2000 word articles today, who will rank on top? Of course, the people who take it up a notch. Smart SEO’s including Neil Patel are creating future proof content by making sure it will stand the test of time.

Lessons about Long Form Content

To stay on top, you should do better than your competition. If your competition is writing 1500 word articles, you should write at least 2000 word articles. If they are writing 2000 word articles, then you should write 3000 word articles. If you want your blog to have continued success, then out performing your competition is great future proof strategy.

2. Use synonyms and LSI Keywords

In 2013, Google launched the hummingbird update to its search algorithm. The Hummingbird update was designed to understand natural language better. With that, Google started understanding and providing better results for long tail searches. After that Google update, Google also started to interpret synonyms and LSI keywords better. LSI means latent semantic indexing, which is a method used by Google to understand a page. To explain it in simple words, LSI means using the words present in the post and deriving meaning from it. Humans understand that cars, driving and steering are related, but Google does not.

After the Hummingbird Update, Google got much better at connecting words that had a similar meanings. Till then, SEO relied only on keywords. After the update, SEO shifted towards topics. Today, just using keywords that you want to rank for in your content is not enough. To show more relevance towards topics, you should include many synonyms and other LSI keywords to rank higher. You be the judge, which of the statements below look natural to you?

“It was the best cake in California. I have had cake many times, but the best cake in California was at this place. There were several cake flavors and all could be the best cake in California”.

Or, “It was one of the best cakes that I’ve had in a long time. I have traveled many places and have had cake in many places before, but by far, this was the best cake in California. The place had many cake flavors and each one was better than the last. If I had to vote, this place would get my vote for the best cake bakery in California for sure.”

Of course, the answer is the second one.

Why Use LSI Keywords

Google uses words present on the page to determine the relevance of your WordPress blog to a specific topic. Using synonym and other LSI keywords increases the relevancy of your content in Google’s eyes. Also, using natural words and synonyms makes your content look natural to your readers as well. By using LSI keywords, you will start ranking for a lot of other relevant keywords as well.

How To Find And Use LSI Keywords

There are many tools to discover LSI keywords, but one simple tool is all you need. LSI Graph is one such tool which helps you generate a lot of LSI keywords. To use LSI Graph, go to lsigraph.com and enter your main keyword. For this example let assume the keyword is “baking a cake”.

Solve the Captcha and click generate. In a few seconds, you will get a handful of keywords that are related to your keyword. If you want to milk this process then you can take the entire list, paste it in Google Keyword Planner and gather search data on all keywords. Now select the keywords with the highest amount of traffic and use them as a base keyword in LSI graph.

Now you will have many more keywords to target. You can repeat the process as many times as you please or till you generate kewords with decent search volumes. After you have created your master list of keywords, select some keywords that are closely related to each other that you can use in your WordPress blog post. Once you have the list, write your content and use the keywords which you selected in the content. It’s that simple (also, check the – Best WordPress eCommerce plugins list).

3. Divide Your WordPress Blog Content In Appropriate Headings

By this time, you already know that dwell time and user experience is becoming an extremely important metric for SEO. Even today, you could get a lot of links to your post and climb higher in the search results. But, if your user experience is bad, Google will quickly kick you off the search results. There are many factors that affect your user exprience. Some of those are:

Mobile friendliness
Site Speed
Use of a good color palette
Use of a good font pair
A font size that is not too hard to read

But have you ever wondered if your content itself gives a good user experience?

Content and User Experience

The best product in the world would not sell well in bad packaging. In the same way, your great content needs to be presented in good packaging as well. Good packaging for your content means that your content is well organized, categorized and optimized. Look at a page from Wikipedia.

Wouldn’t you say it is organized well? People on the web usually don’t read your entire content. They scan your content. If you want your readers to read your content, then you should format your content for scanning. But how do you do it? By splitting your content in headings. Have you ever read a book without an index or chapters? We haven’t too. But it’snot hard to imagine that the reading experience would be terrible. Similarly, WordPress blog post without appropriate headings and paragraphs would have a terrible reading experience. So what should you do to optimize your blog post? Here are few steps that would be helpful.

Have An Index Page

This would be most useful for how to posts and posts that are very long. But, smaller posts can also benefit from doing this. To create an index, you can simple use a plugin called Table of Contents Plus for WordPress. It’s free.

Write Smaller Paragraphs

People rarely read long paragraphs. To make it easy for people, write paragraphs that are no longer than 4 lines.

Use Headings

People might be looking only for specific information out of a huge WordPress blog post. By dividing your content in headings, you make sure that users won’t miss important information.

Use Ordered and Un-Ordered Lists

If you wrote a how to guide on a subject, it’s best to divide your content into multiple steps. It makes for an easier reading experience and is much easier to follow. An un-ordered list is a bulleted list, like the one below:

This is
an example
of a
bulleted list

An ordered list is a list with numbers, like this:

This is an
Example of
A
Ordered List

By using the above guidelines, you will optimize your posts for your readers. When your readers are happy, Google is happy to reward you with better search rankings.

4. Use Internal Linking

In the last few Google updates, Google quietly started focusing on user experience. Only in the past few months has the SEO community actively looked into user engagement and time on site as a ranking factor. Earlier, click through rate (CTR) was introduced as a ranking factor by Google. Rand Fishkin from Moz also did a test on how the CTR affected the ranking of a page. Now, click through rate combined with on-site experience overall counts as a ranking factor. For people who follow the SEO industry closely, this came as no surprise (also, check our WordPress Countdown plugin).

Google has always wanted to provide a better experience to it’s users. It seems logical that if a user clicked on a link and stayed on the website for an extended period of time, read more content and engaged with the website, then that user got the answer to the question he/she was looking for. No matter what your blogging goals are, you can benefit from your users spending more time on your website.

Users who spend more time on your website visit more pages, engage often and result in higher revenue. The big publishers realize this and used many techniques to keep users on their websites for a longer period of time. Here is a small animation showing Forbes. Notice what happens when the user scroll pass through the post. Pay special attention to the url. While you may not have the budget to implement something like this on your blog, there are far easier ways to keep users hooked to your blog. Let’s explore them.

Internal Links

Internal links are links in your content that point to your own website rather than some other website. Internal links are useful for many reasons and provide many benifits.

Internal links can link users to more useful information about a subject on your own WordPress blog
Internal links can answer questions about your content before the user leaves your website to find them elsewhere
Appropriate internal links can boost the SEO of your pages which are not ranking higher

So, the next time you write a blog post, make sure that you link to your previous posts. It will make a big difference to your blog.

When the user has finished reading an important piece of content about a subject, they are primed. Their mind is receptive and they are ready to consume more information on the subject. That is precisely where you should feed them more information about the subject. Doing that is easy with your WordPress blog. Just use related posts. Most plugins for related posts are very easy to configure and have automatic, and manual related post generation features as well.

What that means is most of the time, the heavy lifting about which post should be suggested is done by the plugin itself. You can also set up related posts manually on a case to case basis. In our LSI keyword example, we explored the keyword “baking a cake”. If you had an article about “baking a cake” and some-one read it, you can then suggest few other articles from your own blog which could be related to cake recipes, mistakes to avoid while baking a cake and any other post that can be useful to the reader.

5. Use Images, Graphics And Multimedia

Multimedia is a powerful tool for bloggers. Research by Visual Teaching Alliance has shown that images are processed 60,000 times faster than plain text. It’s also said that an image is a worth a thousand words. If that’s the case, how much is a video worth? Today’s users are hard to impress. They may be annoyed with a slow website, be distracted by a cat video or leave your website if it does not show up correctly on their device. What do you think they will do if they are presented with thousands of words of content of what could be shared in a simple inforgraphic or a video?

Your job as a blogger is to bring readers to your website and keep them engaged. Surely, you can learn a lot from one of the most popular websites in the world which is known for it’s massive engagement. If you didn’t guess it, we were talking about Facebook (also, you can check this WordPress Facebook page plugin).

Facebook is successful at massive scales in keeping their users engaged and hooked onto their service. They keep users of different ages, professions, cultures, languages all engaged. If you can learn the secrets of engagement from Facebook and apply them, your WordPress blog can experience exponential growth. Let’s look at what Facebook has done in the past few years. Before the timeline update a few years back, majority of Facebook posts were text based.

Based on internal research (and much backlash), Facebook launched the time line update. The updated changed the focus of the news feed from text to images. Not only that, they also bought Instagram for 1 Billion Dollars. The focus of Instagram? Sharing images. Most of the blogging world caught on and the use of images became common in blogging. Fast forward today, what is Facebook most focusing on? The answer is video. If you pay attention to your newsfeed, it is now entirely filled with videos and pictures.

Video consumption is already huge, and you are missing out if you are not producing video content. The future of engagement is unknown but by following the master (Facebook), you can anticipate the next trend that will take everyone by storm. It may be 360 Degree video, Virtual reality or augmented reality.

Time will tell. The lesson for bloggers is simple. Pay attention to how your readers and users are behaving and create content that satisfies them and engages them. Perhaps you could start a YouTube channel and post your best content in video form? Or record a podcast or audio version of your post and publish it with your posts? Or share an infographic in the place of a how to content? The techniques you use will heavily depend on you and your audience, but the trend of multimedia is here and you shouldn’t miss it (also, you can check our WordPress Pricing table plugin).

There is intense debate within SEO experts about whether or not social signals help with a WordPress blog’s SEO or not. Recent research by Ahrefs gave mixed ideas about social sharing. They did find that pages on the top of the results had the most social shares, but there is no way to confirm what caused what. What we mean is that these pages could be on top because they had high social shares, or, they could have high social shares because they are in the top results on Google.

Unless Google explicitly tells us so, we don’t have any easy way to determine if social shares actually impact SEO. But social shares do impact another important thing. Traffic! The reason you want to rank higher in the first place is so that you can receive more traffic right? You can easily generate traffic from social media as well. If you somehow got lucky and had one of your posts go viral, then you would possibly generate more traffic than you could imagine.

Social sharing has another benefit. It’s well known that Google also measures time on site and other user experience factors as part of their ranking algorithm. Obviously, Google does not discriminate between traffic generated via search and traffic coming via social media. When you generate traffic from social media and have a great engagement of users on your website, your website SEO can get a good boost as well.

To optimize your post, you should place social sharing button on your posts and encourage your readers to share. In our previous post, we covered some social sharing plugins as well. Apart from this, it’s also important to have the right social markup on your posts.

As a blogger, you know what schema markup is. For those who don’t know what schema markup is, let us explain. Google as a search engine does not understand natural language (yet). So when you write about say, ‘notebook’, Google does not know if you are talking about Notebook the movie, notebooks in general or cracking an inside joke about notebooks. To help Google understand what your content is about, you can include some markup in you post code which will signal to Google what your post is about. Google will use this markup to make a decision about which topics should include your website rank.

Social markup is similar to this, but only for social media. When you (or your reader) shares something on Facebook, Facebook scans the page and generates a thumbnail image and description for what was just shared. The sad part is that Facebook generates this automatically and the end user cannot change or optimize the look of the shared content. As a blogger, you already know the big difference the right image and title can make over clicks. Having no control over what image is shown alongside your post is a wasted opportunity.

The good news is that there is a solution. By implementing appropriate social tags, you can control what images and post description is shown alongside your post. You don’t even have to learn how to write markup language; there are plenty of plugins that will help you put up the appropriate markup in your posts. WPSSO is a free plugin for WordPress that inserts the appropriate markup in your posts for all your social media. The plugin currently supports Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, Instagram, Linkedin and Schema markups for business profiles. For personal profiles, Tumblr, YouTube, and Skype are also supported. The plugin adds many features to your posts, here are a few:

Adds open graph tags for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin etc
Adds Twitter meta cards
Adds Pinterest Rich Pins
You can customize the dimensions for images that will be shared on Facebook, Pinterest etc
Support for Accerelated Mobile Pages
Include author and publisher markup
Use WordPress tags as hashtags while sharing

and many more. By using the appropriate social markup, you can definitely increase the traffic your WordPress blog generates.

7. Promote, Promote, Promote And Promote Some More

I know you don’t want to hear it, but it’s the truth. Without promotion, your content, no matter how amazing it is, will be useless. If Apple created the iPhone and never marketed it, it wouldn’t be such a big success. Most bloggers spend most of their times creating content, but that is going about it the wrong way. Think about it this way. Does McDonalds have best burger in the world? Is Coca Cola the best drink in the world? Does Subway have the best sandwitches in the world?

Does Starbucks have the best coffee in the world? Is Donald Trump the best presidential candidate in the entire USA? The answer to all of them is no. The products of all the above companies are good, but they are on top in their categories not because of only their product, but a combination of product, distribution and marketing. Imagine that you created a new coffee flavour. The coffee that you created is so amazing, it’s smell enough is mesmerizing. The taste is sweet like nectar of the sweetest flower, it’s texture is smooth and creamy. It tastes amazing in black, with milk and everything else. The kick in the coffee would recharge you for the entire day. And you can drink 10 cups a day without side effects (also, you can check our WordPress Coming Soon plugin).

It’s also cheap to produce and you can sell a cup for a dollar each. With coffee this good, would you be a billionaire overnight? Realistically, the answer is no. No matter how good your coffee is, without the right marketing and distribution, your coffee will never become a worldwide success. It’s the same with your WordPress blog posts. You may write the best, most amazing, feature rich, backed by original research, well presented posts in the world, but no one is going to read it. Your WordPress blog would be much more successful if you spend more time promoting the content than creating the content. For every 1 person that reads your post, there are at least 1000 more people who should read your post. Promotions can be many types. Some can be free; some might be paid. Let’s look at some of the promotional strategies that you can use:

Manual Labour

If you have mentioned influencers in your field in your post, the best way to start promoting your content is to get in touch with them. If you already have emails of all the people whom you have mentioned in your post, you should email them before and after your post is live. Send them a sneak peak before and ask for a quote and feedback. After the content is published, email them and thank them for contributing.

After this, search Twitter for people who are tweeting in your niche and tweet to them. You can use many tools or a simple hashtag search to find these people. Next email people who potentially might be interested in your content. These might be people who write about similar topics or have shared similar content in the recent past. Next, share the post in relevant Facebook groups. Make sure you are not violating the group’s guidelines or you will be banned.

Next share your post on other content sharing platforms. Next share your post in relevant forums of which you are a part of. Do not register in a forum just to push your content, it’s a red flag and you could be banned. Next, find relevant subreddit’son Reddit and submit your content there. Be courteous and do not spam. Next, share your post on Facebook from your time-line or page. You may also choose to increase the post’s reach by paying some $$ to Facebook. Next, tweet your content and schedule tweets for the next few days (also, check this useful post – WordPress robots.txt).

Automated Promotion

Send emails to your subscribers letting them know of your content. Encourage them to read and share your content. Your email service provider should be able to automate this. Use an outreach tool like Ninja Outreach or Buzzstream to find influencers and email them using pre-defined templates.

Conclusion

Obviously there are many other ways to promote your content in front of your target audience. But the point of this topic is not discuss content promotion, but to discuss SEO techniques. We hope that the 7 SEO strategies we discussed were simple and easy to understand.

We would love to see you get better results and more traffic after applying these SEO strategies. All of these strategies are powerful and actionable. But, we want to hear from you. If you had do use one of these techniques today on your WordPress blog, which one would you choose? And why? Give your answer in the comments and we will share our thoughts on your answer as well.

WordPress SEO – 7 Strategies To Boost The Blog Traffic