Setting Up A Blog For SEO: How To Get Ranked

Wondering how to get ranked and send more traffic to your website? Success or failure depends on how you set up your blog for SEO.

With the right foundation, any number of organic views and revenue growth is possible.

With the wrong SEO foundation, you could be spending months (or years) spinning your wheels. You may never know why you’re not getting traffic, ranking on Google, and seeing fruit from your online marketing efforts.

How frustrating would that be!?

That’s why you should never skip spending the upfront time to set up a blog for SEO.

We always start at this step when a customer hires us to be their SEO agency. And we’re going to take you through a similar process, showing you exactly what to do—100% free of charge.

This is your chance to set your blog up right from the start, or to fix it if it’s been costing you major traffic for too long.

Let’s get started.

Step 1: Choose A Blog Host

Like most things in life, keeping it simple is the best solution.

For choosing a blog host, we follow this advice and that’s why we recommend you use Bluehost for your WordPress website.

Sure, you could host the blog on your own server, which is expensive, risky, and requires extensive knowledge.

You could go without your own host, which gives you an unprofessional domain that you don’t technically own, and waste time.

Or you can trust an expert like us who sets up websites and hosting for a living each day.

We know all the options and we still choose to host customer sites and the site you’re reading right now on Bluehost. This host is the best when you evaluate based on convenience, affordability, and reliability.

Let’s break down the Bluehost advantages in more detail:

• If you’re not the most website-savvy, you can always chat with a Bluehost customer support rep and get step-by-step assistance on the problem you’re facing
• Only costs around $3-4 a month.
• More security and processes in place than you would have on your own

You can also get a free domain name when you sign up for hosting with Bluehost.

It’s a no brainer, right? We think so too.

Let’s keep moving along.

Step 2: Publish A New ‘Blog’ Page

Again, this section advises and instructs you to use WordPress for your website. If you are on WordPress, scroll over Pages on the left hand sidebar and then click ‘Add New.’

Once that page editor opens, title the page ‘Blog’ and click ‘Save Draft.’ Then ensure the URL/permalink is yourwebsite.com/blog before clicking ‘Publish.’

With this page published, next we want to get your blog posts to automatically show on your Blog page.

To accomplish this:

1. Click ‘Settings’
2. Click ‘Reading’
3. Next to Posts page, select ‘Blog’ in the dropdown menu
4. Click ‘Save Changes’

Step 3: Set Up Blog For Organic Traffic

1. Fix Permalink Settings

A permalink is the fancy word for your website page URL. For example, the permalink of the blog post you’re reading right now is: https://robbenmedia.com/set-up-blog-for-seo.

To get the permalinks showing the correct way for maximum SEO results, you want to click:

1. ‘Settings’
2. ‘Permalinks’
3. ‘Post name’
4. ‘Save Changes’

Now it will automatically show the name of your post title as the permalink.

Lastly, it’s a professional SEO move to change the slug inside the post editor from the full post name to the SEO keyword you’re targeting. If you don’t know what we mean, you will later in an upcoming post.

This post’s name is Setting Up A Blog For SEO: How To Get Ranked and the URL slug was manually edited to /set-up-blog-for-SEO.

2. Install Yoast SEO Plugin

I like to use tools to make my life easier. A SEO tool I swear by is the Yoast SEO plugin.

With Yoast, you’re able to tell search engines like Google exactly what your website and blog posts are about by custom naming the title and meta description for pages and posts.

Yoast will also give you helpful tips (only after you’ve typed in your focus keyword) to help you improve the SEO and readability of each page using a green for good, orange for average, and red for bad grading system.

To get started, you want to Download the Yoast SEO plugin—the free version has everything you need.

Then enter your website info and connect it to Google Search Console.

Yoast will come up again in our SEO playbook, so best to get this task done today to save you time and improve your site traffic.

3. Caching

Your visitors and Google will appreciate a fast website and punish a slow one. When you deploy caching on your site, you’ll significantly improve all of your pages’ load time.

Caching is the process of your website saving the files on pages of your site so it can quickly load those pages for new visitors.

If your site doesn’t cache, then each page will have to load from scratch with no previous memory of what’s supposed to be on the page. This causes a significantly longer load time, and it can be devastating to your bounce rate.

We use this tool W3 Total Cache to get the benefits of caching on our customer’s sites.

And we advise you use the same tool if you’re serious about your website’s SEO traffic.

Onto the next resource.

4. Image Compression

Big images take longer to load, and create slow websites. Again, because Google penalizes slow sites, smaller picture files are a necessity for a fast-loading website.

But what if you have the perfect image, and it’s unfortunate a big one (like 4 MB big)? There’s a solution for that called compression.

We love this amazing WordPress plugin called Compress JPEG & PNG images from TinyPNG because it does two very helpful things:

1. Automatically optimizes new images when you upload
2. Goes through the images already in your media library and optimizes them

By installing a plugin like this, your website takes another step forward in its mission to produce special SEO results.

5. Cloudflare

Look: Website speed matters to Google. It matters to your visitors. And that’s why it has to matter to you.

Even a few wasted seconds, or half-seconds, can make a world of difference between a blog that ranks on the 1st page of Google and the 5th page.

One method of many in how to make your website load faster, is to use a content delivery network (CDN) like Cloudflare.

Using a CDN allows your site to be delivered by a server much closer to your visitor’s location.

For example, with a CDN, a visitor in Los Angeles can view your site quickly because a Los Angeles server delivered it. Without a CDN, a visitor in LA would have to wait longer to see your site because it’s being delivered from Boston, let’s say.

Cloudflare will help keep your website visitors happy when browsing your pages. This means more page views, shares, and purchases.

P.S. Mention Cloudflare when talking to a developer and you’ll immediately sound smart. I met a developer in NYC at a dinner table next to me after he overheard me sharing the value of Cloudflare to my customer.

6. Google Analytics

A rookie blogger mistake is to guess or assume you know exactly what people in your niche are searching on Google.

Maybe you’re right, but why risk it? The downside of writing content that no one searches for nor reads would be devastating.

Instead, it’s easy to use Google Analytics to scientifically know the exact keywords and keyword phrases your customers are searching.

Powered with this precise information, you can answer popular questions your audience asks, write valuable content, become an authority in the industry, and drive new business.

You’ll also be in the know when it comes to where does most of your traffic come from, so you can decide to double down on that or step up your efforts on social media, for example, because your organic search is on fire according to Google Analytics.

And the way you use Google Analytics is up to you. Nerd out on it to understand all your traffic metrics and their sources, or don’t look at it for a year as you build your streams of online traffic.

The point is that it’s better to have it when you want it than to ignore this step and not have SEO performance metics later on.

7. Google Webmaster Tools

There’s a common business phrase that goes, “You can only improve what you can measure.”

If you’re not measuring your Google site traffic, then it’s not that you can’t improve it, but it’ll be much harder. You’ll also know less about your audience and how they interact with your site.

Be smart and use Google Webmaster Tools to track everything, in unison with Google Analytics, related to your website traffic.

The main benefits of Google Webmaster Tools include:

• Detailed access to Google’s search statistics
• Displays your main keywords and where these keywords are ranking
• Latest info on inbound links and internal links
• Insights into indexing on your site
• Updates you if your site has any crawl errors or malware

That last one is a big one because Google will now inform you if there’s an issue with your website. This helps you fix it quickly and saves you from crawling issues that can destroy your traffic numbers.

8. Email Capture

Why email? Email and SEO aren’t exactly grouped in the same bucket.

While that’s true, building an email list gives you an audience who you can then email links to your site to drive traffic. This boost in traffic, and the additional page views and shares, will only help your SEO going forward.

Besides the traffic boost that comes from an email list, this is also a group of people who are signing up to hear more from your brand. Meaning these are prime customers to sell and upsell to when you want to drive revenue growth.

To get an email list synced with your blog, first you need to sign up for an email provider. If you’re starting from scratch then we recommend the free Mailchimp option.

Mailchimp allows you, at no charge until you reach 2,000 subscribers, to set up an email capture on your blog to grow your list and email subscribers.

Emailing your audience once a week or every two weeks is a good starting place.

As with anything, if the emails are jam-packed with value then you can’t go wrong. If it’s a stale email asking for a sale every time then your list will slowly die of unsubscribes and unopened emails.

Step 4: Enhance The User Experience

1. Prioritize Attractive Web Design

First impressions become lasting impressions. Always remember that.

So even if your content is amazing, if your web design is trash, users won’t give your information the time of day. They’ll click away in seconds and visit your competitor’s site.

But when you prioritize great web design, you meet your visitor’s expectations and start the relationship off on the right foot.

For those on a tight budget, then at least find an attractive theme off ThemeForest instead of going with a free theme. You can find a theme that’s ideal for your niche for $35 to $100, and the set up is often extremely easy.

Know we practice what we preach. We invested serious money into paying web designers, graphic designers, copywriters, and developers for the Robben Media website.

It’s paid off as this site is a top driver of new business for our company.

2. Mobile-Friendly Site Design

Human beings have always been visual creatures. We have a natural affinity towards beauty. And it’s no different when a user clicks to your mobile website off a Google search.

They’re expecting an easy navigation around your site. An unfriendly mobile site tells a visitor you don’t value their attention or them, and you’ll deservedly lost them forever.

With 58% of searches coming from mobile, it’s irresponsible nowadays to have a site that doesn’t load right on mobile.

To do good business, you need a website design that is clean, with accessible information, and a positive experience for the mobile user.

Invest in this mobile redesign now as it’s simply the cost of doing business today.

Once you check this task off, let’s move on.

3. Include Blog In The Main Menu

Why spend so much time writing blog content to bury your blog, nowhere to be found? That’s ludicrous. But many website owners will do this.

You want to place your Blog page front and center in the main header menu for everyone who visits your site to see.

Since most people click to the Blog page and then click a blog post, you’re increasing the odds you get multiple page views, reduce bounce rate, and improve on-site time—three important SEO ranking factors.

The Blog page also works as a nice touch to balance out the menu from being too sales-focused with service or product pages. Giving free value, which is what blogs do best, will be appreciated by your website visitors.

To add the Blog to your menu, the page first needs to be published. Then simply:

1. Hover over ‘Appearance’
2. Click ‘Menus’
3. Click the box on the left of ‘Blog’
4. Move the Blog page up or down to the order you wish
5. Click ‘Save Menu’

Then view your site to ensure the Blog page is in the main menu and mobile menu before moving onto the next to-do item.

4. Add A Share Plugin

Giving the user a great experience comes down to knowing what they would want on your site in advance.

And many people who find something interesting online, will naturally want to share it with their family, friends, or co-workers. Data shows that 94% of people who share content do so to help others.

By adding a share plugin to your blog, you help the user share content and help yourself by getting more eyeballs on your website.

There are numerous options to add a share bar to your website. Here are three that you should consider and then pick one:

• Shared Counts
• AddtoAny
• Sumo

The fine line is to have a noticeable, but not obstructing, share bar. It should fit in naturally on the page.

5. Improve Page Speed

A fast-loading website makes people happy. Happy users on your site are more likely to stay, click to new pages, and share links with friends. All of these actions improve your blog’s SEO.

A quick site is also one of the tips we recommend in our article on how to reduce bounce rate—which protects you from a SEO ding if users continue to click to your site and immediately click off it.

To get it right, first, go to Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. Then enter your URL and click analyze.

After doing the test, do you have a slow or fast website?

Google will give you a score and prescribe all the improvements you can make—for mobile and desktop—to enhance your site speed.

By expanding the descriptions, shown below, you’ll get a general idea of what to fix, and you can click the linked learn more to dive deeper.

That’s an awesome free service by Google that you should jump on.

For one, odds are your competition isn’t spending the extra time to do this. And two, the more of these changes you make, the better off for your user and your blog’s SEO.

Speed kills in football and business.

6. Consistent Internal Linking

The worst thing you can do to yourself is to spend hours writing a glorious blog post, then never internally link to it from your site.

(An internal link is linking from one page of your site to another page, thus it’s internal because you’re not linking to a page off your site.)

This mistake lessens the chances visitors see the post and makes it harder for Google to rank you. It’s an unforced error that’s incredibly easy to avoid.

To do an internal link:

1. Highlight the text you want linked
2. Click the ‘Insert/edit link’ button in the WordPress text editor
   
3. Copy and paste the URL into the URL box
4. Click the gear icon for settings
5. Check the ‘Open link in a new tab’ box
6. Click the ‘Add Link’ button

Ensure every page and post you publish has at least one internal link going back to it, ideally more. This will give you a SEO boost and help your readers navigate your site to find more content.

If you’ve not done this yet, I’d encourage you to go back and start linking relevant posts with each other to make up ground.

Conclusion: Take Action

Follow the action steps in this guide to be certain you’re going to set up a blog for SEO success.

Then after you have a blog established properly, focus next on learning how to write a blog post that drives major traffic to your site.

Execute both of these and you’re on your way to building a monster, inbound, online marketing system.

If you can commit to:

• Getting your blog set up in this way
• Publishing top-quality content
• Never stopping

You will put your blog in the best position to get ranked, bring in heavy traffic, and become the number one driver of new sales.

Disclosure: We sometimes use affiliate links which pay us a commission if you purchase a domain or hosting. This is at zero cost, and sometimes a benefit, to you.