Blogging is a hobby that I share with millions of people worldwide. In fact, like many of those people, I thought it would be a great way to hone my writing skills and demonstrate them to potential employers. When I first started my blog, I expected WordPress to do everything for me, but I also turned to Twitter and Facebook for help in getting the word of a new post out there. Once I’d delved deeper into the world of SEO, I discovered a few tricks of the trade that let the bloggers themselves do all the work and which also helps them achieve better results for their blog. It’s certainly worth doing some thorough research on the dos and don’ts of blogging prior to your site launch, but thankfully SEO means there’s still potential to make improvements once a blog’s gone live.

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First of all, ways of the offline world work online too. Networking is an excellent way of building yourself and your blog a reputation, and developing useful contacts. Commenting on other blogs and making it easy to share your content through social media increase the chances of your site being visited. Search engines will also rank your blog higher if it’s linked to by a range of relevant sources.

We all like our categories and classifying stories according to their topic or characteristics. Let’s say your blog is about travel and you’ve recently visited Milan in Italy where you spent a lot of time enjoying the local food scene. Are you guilty of classifying the post under “Cities”, “Countries”, “Food” and “Restaurants”? If compacted simply into “Italy” or “Europe”, search engines will be less confused and are more likely to include it in their search results. After all, categories should be about getting rid of unnecessary clutter.

If you’re struggling to come up with an original topic for a blog post, dig up what’s missing online and what your target audience is yearning for. You never know, people might be seeking the “best Bolognese in Milan” and finding recipes for Carbonara instead. Your clever blog post could provide a far more relevant answer that search engines will recognise and which will then make it more accessible to readers wanting to find out about that specific topic.

Visited Italy before and blogged about it? Or did the delicious spaghetti Bolognese remind you of that time you ate amazing seafood pasta in Spain? Cross-link to your previous musings and watch your page views shoot up as people become intrigued and visit multiple blog posts.

Never underestimate the power of keywords but avoid saturating your text with repetition. You wouldn’t want to find yourself reading a blog post that awkwardly tries to squeeze the phrase “spaghetti Bolognese” in every sentence, would you? Well, Google doesn’t approve either and won’t rank you any higher for it. Instead, include the keyword in your headline and image captions, and use synonyms throughout.