Getting Started With SEO
Whether you are new to blogging or have been doing it for years, it’s hard to know exactly what you should be doing when it comes to SEO. If you’ve been doing this for a while, I bet you’ve been approached by a few people with dubious gmail addresses, who have suggested they will ‘fix’ your SEO.
I don’t know this for certain but I would guess that most of these are trying to make a quick buck by confusing you with terminology and baffling you with technical problems that don’t really affect most bloggers. If you are looking for some help with your SEO, you could try working on a strategy from an SEO agency – a proper SEO agency. Do your research and ask for some credentials to substantiate their claims.
To get you started there are a few free SEO tools that you can take advantage of to help you better identify and act on the opportunity that SEO offers you.
Google Trends
This is one of the best tools for having a look at content topics. You can use it to see the popularity of a search term over time. Google Trends is really good at comparing one search term to the other. You must know that the data is based on an index and it isn’t absolute values. So if the search term was most searched in May 2018 that would show as 100 on the graph, compared with other months.
Yoast
If you are a blogger, using the Yoast plugin is a really smart move. It will give you lots of hints and tips on how to optimise your blog content to be better indexed and therefore better ranking on search engines like Google. The plugin is free and easily integrates with WordPress blogs, making it quick and simple to learn and use for all your blog posts.
Search Console
This is one of the most powerful free tools available to any domain owner. There are lots of great reports in the interface, including how people are entering your site, the proportion of mobile, tablet and desktop visits, average positions and search terms.
Moz
Moz is a tool that every blogger should be using. Moz’s Domain Authority (DA) is one of the main metrics that people want to know when they are looking at working with blogs. Technically Moz isn’t a free tool, but there are some free features you can have access to without a paid subscription. The Link Explorer tool is really useful for looking at where you are gaining links from and where you are losing them. That way you can see what’s helping you grow your DA.
What other free SEO tools do you use? If you have others you’d like to share, I’d love to hear about them.
Read more posts in the Everything Else Category