Category Archives: Blog Publishing

Creating unique images for blog posts with image mashups

I really enjoy creating unique images for my blog posts. If you have noticed, I often create a mashup of different ages.

It is time consuming and sometimes even exhausting. But when I have created unique images for my blog posts, I feel good.

Of course, to be able to create unique images for my blog posts sometimes I have to use multiple image editing tools because I haven’t acquired mastery over one particular tool.

For example, I have been doing basic image editing in Photoshop for many years, but still, I haven’t learned its advanced features.

Nonetheless, it is a great tool for creating the sort of image mashups that I have been creating. For example, if I want to extract a portion of an image I have taken from the Internet, I can do that with Photoshop. I can also remove the background. Creating images with transparent backgrounds is also quite easy with Photoshop.

Along with Photoshop I also use PhotoScape to create additional effects. There is another image editing tool from Wondershare that I have been using.

The benefit of creating an image mashup is that you can create highly unique images for your blog posts without someone blaming you of stealing his or her images.

Not all of us have advanced hardware and software to create awesome images. Also, extensive training is required to be able to create professional graphics, especially with Photoshop. Unless you create graphics and images professionally, it doesn’t make sense to go very deep into Photoshop.

So, the next best option is, find a few images using image search on Google, select small portions of different images but make sure that they are logically connected, and create a mashup. You get a highly unique image for your blog post.

How to use guest blogging to grow your traffic

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Using guest blogging to grow your traffic

Although I haven’t used guest blogging to grow my traffic much, I know it has great potential. It’s just that, I’m obsessed with my own blog and with the limited amount of time that I have, I prefer to spend it writing content for my own blog.

Even when guest blogging can help me increase my website traffic in a meaningful manner, some psychological hurdle has been blocking me.

In this blog post I’m going to talk about how to use guest blogging to grow your traffic in the hope that, it may also inspire me to do the same.

There are multiple ways you can use guest blogging to increase your website traffic.

The inspiration to write this blog on how to use guest blogging to grow your traffic came from the email update I received from LinkedIn promoting one of their posts: The State of Guest Blogging: How to Guest Post and Grow Your Traffic.

What is guest blogging? Does it really increase your traffic?

Guest blogging explained

Guest blogging means writing for someone else’s blog to get exposure from an entirely new audience.

Whether it can actually increase your traffic depends on the quality of your writing and also the quality of the blog or the website where you are guest blogging.

There was a time when guest blogging was used mainly to get inbound links – publishers who publish your guest blog, attribute it to you and along with the attribution, they also link to your blog or website.

Those days, most of the people who were seriously trying to drive traffic to their websites, resorted to guest blogging.

Then people started using the “nofollow” tag and many blogs and online magazines these days give you no benefit in terms of backlinks.

If you want to write for them, they say, write it for pure exposure, and nothing else.

There are still some websites and blogs that give you “follow” backlinks, but their count is decreasing fast.

What is the difference between “nofollow” and “follow”?

Every website or blog has a page rank. It’s some sort of a ranking power or a ranking fuel.

It’s kind of a currency.

All the external links published on that website or blog get a small portion of this currency based on how much currency the website or the blog has.

Naturally, if a website or a blog has lots of page rank currency, it can distribute this currency to multiple links, but at the cost of losing some of it.

Webmasters who want to drive traffic from search engines need “follow” backlinks from these currency-rich websites and blogs if they want to increase traffic from search engines by improving their SEO.

Actually, there is no thing as “follow” backlinks. By default, every backlink is a “follow” backlink.

Since lots of people were trying to improve their SEO and consequently, drive search engine traffic to their websites, Google came up with the option of “nofollow”.

A blogger or Webmaster can use this attribute with every href tag to save his or her page rank currency but at the same time be able to link to external websites and blogs.

Coming back to guest blogging and how it can drive traffic to your website or blog.

How it can help you increase traffic.

Guest blogging helps you in two ways: gets you exposure on other websites and blogs, and gets you free, quality content for your own blog.

If things go well, I will be publishing a blog post from a guest blogger today.

Of late, as an increasing number of people are able to find my blog on search engines, I have been getting lots of queries from people interested in writing for my blog in exchange of a link to their website or blog.

Obviously they want to increase traffic by getting a link from my blog which enjoys better search engine rankings.

I use a plug-in that attaches a “nofollow” tag to every external link that I publish on my blog or website, but the plug-in also has a provision to make exceptions.

Being an experienced content writer and blogger, I can make out whether a guest blog has been written purely for the purpose of getting a backlink or the writer has invested some good amount of time and intention into writing the blog post.

When I feel that the writer really deserves a “follow” backlink, I make an exception.

Anyway, this was just to explain to you what is guest blogging.

Whether you are guest blogging or you are publishing blog from guest bloggers, provided you maintain a level of quality, you can increase traffic, you can drive more traffic.

Using guest blogging to grow your traffic

Traffic growth with guest blogging

As I have explained to you, guest blogging helps you in two ways:

Gets you exposure and traffic from other blogs and websites where you publish your guest blog post.
Gets you fresh and regular content for your own blog and in return, increases your search engine rankings, and in return, grows your traffic.

Hence, whether you guest post on other blogs or you allow other writers to guest post on your own blog, you can use guest blogging to grow your traffic.

How to approach online publishers and bloggers for guest blogging opportunities?

How to approach publishers for guest blogging opportunities

If you want to know how to use guest blogging to grow your traffic, one of the most important things to learn is, how to approach other online publishers and bloggers for guest blogging opportunities.

Guest blogging needs to be a full-fledged strategy.

It’s a sustained effort.

Before you move forward with your guest blogging strategy to grow your traffic, you must know why you want to guest blog (assuming for the time being that you are planning on writing for other blogs and websites).

First decide why you want to publish guest blog posts

This Ultimate Guide to Guest Blogging by Neil Patel gives you every information you are ever going to need to learn about how to use guest blogging to grow your traffic.

He says that there are three reasons why you may choose to guest blog:

You want to position yourself as an authority in front of a new audience.
You want to leverage a high traffic website or blog to get traffic.
Generate backlinks to your website or blog.

Keeping these reasons in mind will help you come up with appropriate guest blogging ideas and also approach the most suitable publishers for your guest blogging campaign.

Make a list of industries you would like to use guest blogging to grow your traffic

Randomly picking websites and blogs for guest blogging opportunities is going to be labor intensive as well as ineffective.

There is no need to approach every blog or website looking for writers.

You want to focus on your niche.

Make a list of niches you would like to focus.

Your competitors won’t publish your guest blog posts for obvious reasons unless you offer them something really irresistible – some sort of insight that you haven’t published on your own website.

If you are an app developer you would like to find websites and blogs on app development and ancillary technologies.

If you are a fashion designer, you may look for websites and blogs on lifestyle, celebrities and clothing.

If you are a content marketer, you may like to approach websites and blogs offering content marketing tips and tutorials.

The basic idea is, make a list of websites and blogs who would publish your guest blogs, and who will be directly or indirectly related to your industry or subject matter.

Finding the right publishers for guest blogging opportunities

This is very important. It’s given that whichever blogger or website owner you approach accepts guest blogging.

To begin your search, you can search for terms like

“looking for guest bloggers”
“submit guest post”
“we accept guest bloggers”
“guest post by”
“guest post guidelines”
“write for us”

You can combine these search terms with your industry, something like “content marketing write for us”.

You can use different search engines to prepare a nice list.

I would use Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo.

You can prepare an Excel sheet of all the links you have discovered.

Create different columns for the URL, industry, contacted/not contacted and response.

Prepare a message to offer your guest blog

When I receive offers from other guest bloggers, 90% of the offers I ignore.

This is because I know they have simply sent out a generic message to multiple publishers without having a look at my website.

Those messages that don’t have my name are immediately consigned to the trash folder.

Finding guest blogging opportunities to grow your traffic isn’t something that you want to do in a hurry.

If you don’t have much time, just study 1-2 links everyday.

Try to find everything about the blog including the owner of the blog, the person in charge of publishing and most importantly, what type of content is published.

Carefully study the blog

Go through different guest blog posts on the blog and see what topics guest bloggers cover when writing for that blog.

Pay close attention to the quality of the content.

If the blog is indiscriminately publishing guest blog posts, stay away from such a blog.

You don’t want to publish your guest blog on a blog that easily accepts blog posts from other bloggers.

Once you have gathered enough information that will help you write a personal message to the person concerned, you can write something like this:

Hello {name}.

Having great interest in {mention the field} I have been closely following your blog for some time now.

Your blog post on {mention the blog post} was especially insightful, especially the part where you say {mention the part}.

Of late I have been searching for guest blogging opportunities and your blog immediately came to my mind.

One of the greatest reasons why I would like to write for your blog is that I have noticed you’re a stickler for quality.

So, when I send you my submission, I know that you will publish it only if it is worth publishing.

I look at it as a positive challenge.

Here is the topic I think that can add some value to your blog {mention topic}.

If you’re interested, let me know and I will send you a draft.

Not interested?

No need to worry. I won’t take it personally.

Looking forward to hearing from you, and well done for all that great content!

Cheers!

{your name}

You don’t have to use the exact words, but if you use the underlying philosophy your message will be better received.

How to use guest blogging to grow your traffic even when you don’t want to ask other bloggers?

Sometimes you’re not comfortable with approaching other bloggers.

I can understand.

It doesn’t mean you cannot use guest blogging to grow your traffic.

There are many high traffic websites where you can create a presence for yourself and in return, use the platform for guest blogging.

You can use the LinkedIn publishing platform, for example.

The professional social networking platform allows you to publish blog posts.

When you publish a blog post on LinkedIn, all your contacts are immediately notified.

If LinkedIn features your blog post in one of its newsletters or in the “featured posts” section, it can generate massive amount of traffic for your blog or get you great visibility.

You can use Medium.

It is a great blogging platform with its own audience.

Both LinkedIn and Medium enjoy good search engine rankings and when you publish your content on these publishing platforms, it will be quickly crawled and indexed by all major search engines, helping you grow your traffic in the process.

Similarly, there are many niche platforms, HackerNoon, for example, where you can publish your guest blog posts to grow your traffic if you don’t want to approach independent bloggers.

If you want to use guest blogging to grow your traffic please remember that it is not a quick fix approach.

Just like any other content marketing method, it is going to take strategy, patience and lots of hard work.

There is no benefit in publishing your guest blog posts on websites that accept inferior quality content.

But, websites that accept quality content will not easily publish your post.

Hence, it takes time, patience and hard work.

It is an ongoing process.

Always be on the look.

Increase your expertise.

Improve your writing style (or work with an experienced content writer).

Expand your network using social media.

You can definitely use guest blogging to grow your traffic, provided you know what you want to communicate and which blog audience is the best for you.

Here is a nice list of 100 places where you can submit your guest blog posts.

How to write meaningful blog posts for your business blog

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The image shows a games court with a goal post encouraging you to write meaningful blog posts

Writing meaningful blog posts for your business blog

A business blog isn’t always about promoting your business. Of course, you want to cover every possible topic not just to improve your SEO but also to give a reason to people to visit your website repeatedly so that you can engage them and establish a lasting relationship with them.

But the success of your business blog depends on writing meaningful blog posts.

When I’m writing blog posts for my business blog, for example this particular blog post, my intentions are

To help you learn something about content writing and content marketing.
To showcase my knowledge and experience.
To give you as much information as possible so that you can make up your mind about hiring me as your content writer.
Making it easier for you to find my website on search engines.
Giving people a reason to share my content on social media.

If I can achieve the above five or at least a few points, the blog post becomes meaningful for me.

Multiple times on my blog I have written about “searcher’s intent”: why someone is searching and trying to find the content that you have. If your blog post satisfies the intent of the searcher, it is a meaningful blog post.

Find out what is the searcher’s intent and then write.

Remember that substance is very important. People can easily make out fluff. Whatever you publish, it must solve the purpose of its existence.

Listed below are a few steps you can take to write meaningful blog posts for your business blog.

Understand what your readers are looking for and then provide the information in their language

To be able to write meaningful blog posts for your business blog it is very important to know for whom you’re writing. The more you know, the better you write.

Remember that blogging is a conversation. This is why it is different from your main website content. Your blog is informal. It is formatted in a friendly, convenient manner. When people read your blog, they must feel that someone is sitting right in front of them and talking to them. Someone who understands them. Someone who knows what they’re going through and accordingly, is offering a solution.

Also, write in a language your target audience is comfortable in. Industry jargon is good if you are writing B2B content and in fact, sometimes if you don’t use technical knowledge, it can be counterproductive. Hence, again, it is very important to understand your audience and then write your blog posts accordingly.

Write to share knowledge and know-how

I’m perpetually writing on content writing. Sometimes content marketing and copywriting. But my primary motive is to explain to my readers why quality content is important for their business. The more knowledgeable my readers are, the more comfortable they get with the idea of hiring a professional content writer for their website and for business blogging.

Take for example this blog post. In this blog post you are learning how to write meaningful blog posts for your business blog. After reading this blog post, you may decide to write on your own, you may decide to hire another content writer, or you may decide to contact me. But the basic purpose is, to make you knowledgeable enough so that you decide that you need meaningful content to maintain a successful business blog.

The good thing about sharing knowledge is that it makes people feel good about themselves. After going through my business blog, you end up knowing more about not just content writing and content marketing, but also the benefits of having high quality content. I don’t force you to hire me. I just share the knowledge and then leave it up to you.

Showcase your skills and experience

For specialized fields, it is very important that you share your skills and experience through your business blog. I write for a mobile app development company and they often publish blog posts on various technology stacks, programming languages and interface design tools that they use with their projects. They also discuss the pros and cons of using certain programming languages and interface design tools. This tells their clients that they haven’t just used different technology stacks, but have also used them in such a manner that they can share their skills and experiences with these technology stacks. This is a reassuring to prospective clients.

Don’t let search engine rankings dominate your thought process

Higher search engine rankings are important. If you want people to be able to find your content, you shouldn’t ignore SEO. But the problem is, many businesses want to publish blog posts on their business blogs solely for the purpose of SEO.

The entire purpose of writing blog posts for your business blog is to deliver value. When people go back after reading your blog post, they must feel enraged. You blog post must solve the purpose of its title. When you close the tab after reading this blog post, you must know at least something about writing meaningful blog posts rather than simply filling your blog with SEO-friendly content.

Even if initially you can improve your SEO without focusing much on meaningful content, you will lose your rankings once people negatively respond to your blog posts. Google uses artificial intelligence to figure out how people respond to your content and accordingly rearranges your rankings.

If you don’t want to neglect your SEO, carefully choose your topics. For example, I want people who want to write meaningful blog posts (or at least want to help their content writer achieve that) for their business blogs to be able to find this blog post. This is a focused topic. If I stick to this topic and if I include all the necessary information that makes this topic meaningful, search engine optimization will be automatically taken care of.

Focus on your writing style

Your writing style is very important to keep people hooked to your business blog. Sentence structure is important. Where you use what words is important. Therefore, even if they have complete knowledge of their field, many entrepreneurs prefer to hire a professional content writer so that they can have freely flowing writing on their business blog rather than something that sounds stiff and displays lack of writing practice.

Participate in ongoing discussion on other blogs

This can be very interesting, and it constantly gives something new to ponder to your visitors. There must be many niche blogs in your field and the publishers must be publishing thought-provoking and sometimes even controversial blog posts. Do you agree with what they have published? Do you disagree? You can publish counter blog posts on your own business blog, with your own facts and research.

Publish well researched blog posts on your business blog

People love statistics and data. Researching can be time-consuming and if you have hired a content writer then it may even cost more per blog post compared to non-researched blog posts, but it is worth the effort and expense.

Research doesn’t always have to be data crunching. It also means backing up your claims by linking to other well researched articles and blog posts. For example, I say that well researched blog posts do better, and if you don’t believe me, you can read this Buffer post How and why to write persuasive, research-backed content.

Business blogging is a commitment. It is a coming together of your business and your customers and clients on a common platform. Your blog must touch the lives of your current and prospective customers and clients through valuable content. Only then your business blog will be meaningful.

Want to write for the Credible Content blog?

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Write for the Credible Content blog

As my Credible Content blog is picking up on search engines and social media, lots of bloggers are asking if they can publish guest blog posts on the blog.

On-and-off I do publish guest blog posts. Since these queries are increasing, I thought, why not prepare a separate page with some guidelines?

Both English and Hindi blog posts accepted

I don’t want to prepare a comprehensive guidelines-set. I believe that every writer has his or her own way of writing and that is fine with me. As long as your writing is interesting, informative and without errors, there is no specific stylesheet that I follow.

Anyway, keep the following in mind:

I accept blog posts on the following topics:
1. Content marketing
2. Content writing
3. Email marketing
4. SEO
5. Digital marketing
6. Copywriting
External links have the “nofollow” attribute within the body text, but you can have a link to your website or profile in the author box with a “follow” attribute.
Use lots of headlines, subheadlines and bullet points.
Keep your blog posts between 1200-2000 words.
You can submit blog posts in the following languages:
1. English
2. Hindi
Goes without saying: no plagiarism and copy/paste.
Goes without saying: proper proofreading and Grammar check.

I will update this page if something else comes up in my mind. Use my usual contact form to contact me if you are contacting me for the first time.

This is how you use your blog to improve your SEO

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Content marketers and SEO experts often advise you to start publishing a business blog. Even on my blog I have often written about the benefits of regularly publishing a business blog.

Although publishing a blog can seem like a daunting task, especially considering the prospect of having to write quality content regularly, you can use your blog to tremendously improve your SEO.

Actually, for many years people have already known that if you regularly blog, it is good for your SEO.

Why is a blog good for your SEO?

It is the very nature of the blog that is preferred by the search engine ranking algorithms.

What do search engines like?

They like to crawl and index lots of fresh content.

On your blog, provided you update it with new content regularly, the search engines (let’s say Google for clarity’s sake) get to crawl new content repeatedly.

Every blog has a theme, preferably. For example, my this blog deals with content writing and content marketing.

Since almost all the blog posts are about content writing and content marketing on my blog (blogging is a very important component of content marketing), Google deems it as an authority place for these topics.

There is a greater density of keywords pertaining to my profession on this blog.

Suits Google’s ranking algorithm.

On majority of blogs the home page is simply a collection of the most recent blog posts, arranged time-stamp-wise descending order with the latest blog post appearing at the top.

So, the home page is constantly updating, the side bar is constantly updating, the new blog posts are constantly being added, new images are constantly being added. It’s a never-ending party for Google crawlers.

Even the structure of blog posts is by details search engine friendly. The title appears within the <h1> tag in most of the cases. There is meta data to give extra information to the search engine crawlers.

Hence, an averagely updated blog is anyway search engine friendly.

Does having a blog automatically improve your SEO?

Data Source

Something, is always better than nothing

Even if the SEO benefit is not apparent, just by existing, your blog improves your SEO.

The benefit doesn’t bring you much profit because it has to compete with other blogs in your business.

If I don’t see any improvements in my search engine rankings even when I blog regularly, it’s because there is too much competition in my field. There are some established content writing and content marketing blogs that are miles ahead of my blog.

So even if my SEO is improving, I’m constantly being pushed behind by more prominent blogs.

This is true for every niche that has competition.

If you blog regularly and still your SEO doesn’t improve it doesn’t mean it actually isn’t improving, it’s just that your competitors are undoing your effort by being better than you.

So, does it mean there is no use trying to improve your SEO with your blog.

This recent Search Engine Land blog post explains what changes you can make to your blog to get an SEO edge over your competitors.

Using your blog to improve your SEO

As I’ve explained above, the very nature and structure of a blog is such that search engines prefer them over regular websites.

But, since all the blogs are by default SEO friendly (unless you’ve chosen a really terrible theme or template), even your competitors’ blogs must be optimized.

So how do you make your blog more SEO friendly.

These are some of the things you can do to improve your blog SEO, according to the above SEL post…

Name your blog appropriately

What does appropriately mean? The post above says create a compelling name, but I would add that create an appropriate name.

It means try to have your main keyword in the title of your blog.

For example, the title of my blog is “Credible Content Blog”

If you want to add some more spice (you’ve got 70 characters to play with) you can add more words.

The page <title> tag of the home page of my blog is “No-Clutter Content Marketing and Content Writing Advice – Credible Content Blog”.

Of course, you can be more creative, and there is nothing wrong in being more adventurous.

Just keep in mind that when someone comes across the title of your blog somewhere (assuming you are not a well-known brand like Samsung or Accenture) he or she should immediately be able to know what it is about.

The above SEL post suggests you keep the following pointers in mind while coming up with the title of your blog:

What is the overarching theme of the blog?
What would be a compelling description in my industry?
Can I incorporate important SEO keywords in the blog’s title or name?
Specifically, whom am I trying to reach?

Target on narrow audience with every post

When you focus on a narrow audience it is easier to optimize your keyword targeting.

Every business has different narrow sections.

In this blog post I’m targeting people and businesses interested in using a blog for SEO.

This is very easy. Before creating a new blog post, always have the intention in your mind.

What do you want to convey?

What particular problem you should solve?

Who would be best served by this upcoming blog post?

This can be done by focusing on just a single topic.

If you want to publish your blog posts in question-answer format, answer every question in a separate, dedicated blog post.

Don’t try to handle multiple questions in a single blog post because this dilutes the focus of your blog post, which is not good for your SEO.

Follow an SEO-friendly URL structure

Well, this is something I need to pay close attention to because I normally tend to use the default URL that is generated by my WordPress setting. My URLs are normally very long, which is not good.

If you are using WordPress to manage your blog, it is a given that we don’t use its default URL structure which is something like yourblog.com/?p=48.

Normally the words contained within the title of your blog post are concatenated into a string and a URL is generated.

If your blog post titles are shorter and to the point, the URLs can be used as they are, but if your blog post titles are very long and contain lots of words, it is always prudent to shorten your URLs.

For example, when I publish this blog post, the default URL generated by WordPress is going to be /this-is-how-you-use-your-blog-to-improve-your-seo/, which is not very SEO-friendly.

On the other hand, if my blog post URL is something like /how-use-blog-improve-seo/ it is shorter, and it uses all the main keywords of the blog post.

If you use WordPress, there is a plug-in that automatically takes care of this issue.

Optimize your blog post content continuously

There are two ways of doing this: take care of all the optimization issues when you are publishing your blog post for the first time, and then, revisit your blog post whenever you get a chance and see if it can be optimized further.

The initial optimization steps can be like

Use your main keyword or search term in the first 100 words of your blog post content.
Make sure your main keyword is present in the title of your blog post, preferably in the beginning.
Use your keywords and their variations every 100-150 words (don’t over use your keywords because this will invite SEO penalty).
Use multiple optimized images. Normally there is a tendency to use just one image in the beginning as featured image. But, if your blog post is 1200 words long use at least 4-5 images. I don’t do it myself, but ideally there should be an image after every 300 words.
Write longer blog posts. Longer blog posts are considered good for SEO because they are difficult to write. You can have more information on a particular topic. You can use your keywords and search terms more often when you write longer blog posts. Even Google thinks that longer blog posts are better than shorter blog posts. The ideal length these days is 1200-1500 words.

How do you optimize your blog post after you have published it?

Keep checking its rankings every week. If it doesn’t show up in search, you need to optimize it further.

You can use the SEOPressor WordPress plug-in to analyze your blog post. It tells you whether you have under-optimized or over-optimized your blog post – both are bad for your SEO.

In this blog post titled Should you always be writing optimized content to improve SEO? I have talked more about the SEOPressor WordPress plug-in.

Another way of improving SEO of individual blog posts is by turning selected blog posts into “pillar posts”. You may like to read What are topic clusters and pillar pages and how they improve your SEO?

Cover your individual keywords and search phrases by dedicated blog posts

One of the greatest SEO benefits of publishing a blog is that you can write blog posts on keywords and search phrases that you haven’t been able to cover on your main website.

It would seem off-topic if I try to explain how to use your blog to improve your SEO within my main website because on the main website I mostly talking about my services and how I can serve well my clients’ interests.

The feel and the language of the main website is different from your blog. On your blog you can be more conversational and informal and it is easier to talk about related or slightly related issues.

Use optimized images and videos for better SEO

As you publish more and more, your blog posts are going to be a mix of images and videos.

Do you know Google prefers lighter images? I recently read in a blog post (I can’t find it right now) that Google probably prefers PNG files to JPG files. Ever since then I have started using PNG files.

A good thing about using PNG files is that by little tweaking you can considerably reduce their size without compromising on visual quality.

You can optimize images and videos by supplying appropriate text around the images and videos.

You must already know that whenever you use an image you need to use the ALT tag to supply the alternative text for the image.

The text that you write around the image is also taken as an indication of what the image represents and this information is used when the image is shown in the image search engine result pages. The same holds good for videos.

Use proper markup for your blog posts

Markup gives extra information to the search engines which helps them rank your blog posts accordingly.

Markup is just like the old HTML tags that contain specific information like <title> and <meta name=”description” content=”” />.

Markup is just the extra information that helps search engines like Google know more about the nature of your content.

I will give you a simple example of how your markup information can help Google decide whether to show your content or not…

Suppose you create a blog post titled “Review of The Godfather”.

In the “genre” markup tag you can mention whether it is the “Movie” or the “Book” you are talking about.

Here is a nice explanation of what is schema markup and what is the benefit of using it.

If you’re not very comfortable with the intricacies of the source code, I will again refer to the WordPress plug-in SEOPressor that allows you to enter markup information.

Promote your blog posts on social media and social working platforms

This may not seem like specifically using your blog to improve your SEO, but it is.

Although the search engine crawlers, especially Google crawlers, may start crawling and indexing your content sooner or later if you persistently publish new content, you will start getting SEO benefits faster if you promote your content aggressively.

Recently, CognitiveSEO has published a very big study on how various social signals can boost your SEO.

Your social media and social networking profiles are ready-made platforms for you.

Use platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Google+ to promote your new links.

In fact, it is rumored that by merely posting your content on Google+ you can have a positive impact on your search rankings.

To improve your SEO you need backlinks. People should link to your content voluntarily, but for that, they should be able to discover your content.

Since most of the influencers are on social media these days it is easier to put your content in front of them rather than leaving everything on serendipity.

Many clients approach me to get content to improve their SEO. Sometimes they want to use content marketing solely for its SEO benefits.

I don’t appreciate the approach but it is definitely better than doing nothing. It’s after all fresh and relevant content that keeps you ahead of your competitors in search engines.

But if you are really interested in improving your search engine rankings and you don’t want to get embroiled in some “SEO tactics”, publishing a regular blog is the best way of doing it.

Search engines love blogs. Blogs have focused, targeted information. They are centered around specific keywords and themes. The content is organized in such a manner that it makes total sense to search engine algorithms.

If you don’t have a blog, start one now, and if you have it but it has so far remained in doldrums, dust it off and give it a nice push. Let me know if I can help in any manner.