Blogging began as a way to keep a digital journal, but over the years it has evolved into a popular pastime and viable career path. (read this tale of a London SEO expert success story you’ll never believe) With so much competition out there, it’s more important than ever to have a high-quality blog. In this post, I’ll highlight a few ways — from upgraded web hosting services to embracing SEO — to improve your website.
When it comes to creating and maintaining a successful blog, there are many, many things to consider. Although the design and content are the first things your readers will notice, the efficiency, SEO, and quality of your website hosting also play a vital role. In this post, we’ll take a look at why each of these benefit you and how you can implement them into your site.
- Quality Over Quantity
The blog posts you write are not only your website’s main purpose but also a representation of you as a person and a writer. Ensuring that the content you publish is of the highest possible quality will establish a stronger connection with your audience and give them a reason to keep visiting your website.
Although it’s good SEO practice to publish content on a regular basis, it’s vital not to slip into the habit of writing for the sake of writing. You should always prioritise quality over quantity when it comes to blogging, so plan ahead, research thoroughly, and don’t rush the writing process. Oversaturating your blog with too many posts will make it difficult for your audience to keep up and is a good way to lose readers.
- Is Your Blog User-Friendly?
Before people get a chance to read your content, the first thing they see is your website’s design. It’s for this reason that a professional and appealing design is essential, to make a great first impression and ensure that your posts get read. Although the style and aesthetic of your blog are important, it’s also vital that it’s user-friendly, because even the most amazing design will come unstuck if it’s a nightmare to use.
In this instance, you should aim to make your website as simple to use as possible. This means menus and other navigational tools have to be in plain sight, the font you use needs to be legible, and your website must be mobile-friendly. A few years ago, mobile internet usage overtook desktop for the first time, so without a mobile-friendly site, you’ll substantially decrease your potential readership.
- Upgraded Web Hosting Services
Another important aspect of website creation and maintenance is web hosting. This is the service that provides you with the web space and bandwidth to get online. If you’re yet to re-evaluate your website hosting service since you first created your site, it’s vital to upgrade if your current service no longer suits your needs. There’s a good chance that your traffic is now higher, meaning you need greater hosting resources to keep everything up to speed.
A higher quality website hosting service (e.g. upgrading from shared hosting to VPS servers) will improve site performance. This is another way to enhance user-friendliness as it means your blog will load quicker and be a lot smoother to navigate. Those things are necessities these days, as we expect our internet to be fast — our patience for slow sites has seriously dwindled.
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
As a blogger and someone who spends a fair amount of time online, it’s likely you will have heard of ‘SEO’ before. This stands for search engine optimisation and is a series of techniques you can employ to make your blog rank higher on search engines.
Optimising your blog posts and website copy for SEO — and therefore making your blog appear on the higher pages of a search — will prove to be a massive benefit for increasing your readership and establishing your site as an authoritative voice in your chosen niche.
So now that we’ve established that SEO is a fantastic thing for your blog, here are a couple of easy ways to get started:
- Keywords: Keywords are words and phrases that are entered into search engines. First, you need to decide on a few keywords that relate to your blog and that you believe you can rank highly for. Then use these keywords throughout your content to make sure your site appears in more search results.
- Backlinks: Backlinks are external links to high-authority websites inserted into your posts to help support aspects of the article like statistics and quotes. Doing so tells search engines that your site is a reliable and relevant source of information, and in the process greatly improves your site’s SEO.
Are you a blogger looking to kick things into gear in 2018? The tips in this post are a few ideal ways to make some adjustments to your website, current content, and future posts to give you the best chance of increasing your readership and brand recognition.
