Welcome to Day 4 of ‘How to start a travel blog and make money’ FREE email course!
Today’s topic is SEO. The acronym means “Search Engine Optimisation”. It is basically a strategy that Internet marketers use to rank websites on the first page of Google with the purpose of getting as many readers as possible. It’s basically organic traffic.
Do I need to learn SEO?
If you want to be in the travel blogging industry this is something that eventually you must learn. Why?
Because organic traffic from Google can grow continually with time, it’s free (there is also paid traffic though) and can bring potential customers to your blog.
Many bloggers are intimidated when it comes to learning about SEO. But it’s not that difficult after all. It just takes time to research and practice. Honestly, we felt the same when we starting blogging. We knew nothing about SEO, but now we actually love to use different techniques and learn more new things to improve our organic traffic.
So, how does it work?
Well, the topic is huge so we’ll try to explain some useful essentials.
First of all, if you want your blog to appear in search engines, you must write informative and helpful articles. Check for yourself. When you use Google, what do you type in the search box? Mostly questions or specific phrases. You are not looking for the travel diary of a completely unknown person. So, why would someone find and read your travel diary on your blog (except for your family or friends)?
People look for advice on how to travel, what to pack, what to see and do in a country or a city. They want to book a cheap or a luxury hotel, they want to learn about the culture, and they want to know where and what to eat.
For example, you might type the keywords in Google — “best restaurants in Bangkok” because you want to eat well in the city. Now imagine that like you, many other people might search for those same keywords. So why not write an article about that?
First things first, you need to check if this keyword will generate some traffic. For this you’ll need some tools. There are many websites and methods when it comes to keyword research.
We use KWFinder. We cannot imagine our SEO work without it. You can try a free version, or you can purchase the basic plan that will be enough for starting. From our own experience the basic plan will do the job.
With this tool you search for the keyword and you can see whether it’ll be easy or not to rank with it in Google, the monthly search volume of that keyword, the competition and suggestions for alternative or similar keywords.
So you have your keyword(s), you found out it’s possible to rank in Google…
What do you do now?
You write the blog post! In your article you include this specific keyword(s) that you did your research on in the following places:
- In the title (if possible at the beginning)
- In the URL (again at the beginning. Keep in mind that this is the link of your post and once this is set and your post is published, you should NEVER change it)
- In the first 100 words
- In one subheading
- Another time in the article possibly higher in the post
- In the ‘alt text’ of the images
- In the description of the post
That’s it. You’ve just done the basics of on-page SEO. You can install the YOAST plugin on your blog that will tell you if your article is optimized. Your aim is going to have the post marked with a ‘green light,’
After you have published your post, there are many things you can do to help rank it on the first page of Google. But the most important thing is getting backlinks.
What are backlinks?
Google algorithm analyses many factors when scanning the web. The most crucial part is the backlinks. Basically, the more websites that are linking to your article, the higher you might rank in the Google pages.
How do you get websites to link to your articles? There are hundreds of ways. Here are some of them:
- Guest posts on other blogs
- Links exchange
- Interviews
- Collaborative Posts
- Submit to Blog directories
- Comments on other blogs
Just remember that it’s not only about quantity but also about quality. Not all backlinks are the same. There are many factors involved with the quality for example if they are do-follow or no-follow, if they come from high domain authority site, and many more.
This is what is called off-page SEO.
Now, time for a small recap. To get organic traffic from Google you must learn how to do the following things:
- Keywords research
- Implement keywords in your posts
- Get quality backlinks to your posts
You should always monitor and track your keywords. Usually, if you have worked well, you might be able to rank on the 1st page after 6-9 months.
As we said before, SEO is an extensive topic and we’ve only started to scratch the surface in this lesson. If you want to know more, you can find additional information from this excellent guide for beginners.