SEO Blogging: Redrafting EVERY POST
When Mummykind was started there was no SEO blogging, we just wrote everything the way it sounded in our heads. You can get a real sense of voice form our archives, but as we grow and develop we can also accept that some of our content was… Hard to digest!
What is SEO Blogging?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It’s how search engines decide what results to put first and what to bury deep down beyond the first page. SEO blogging is a way of making your content more visible to people searching for a particular topic.
There are checks that search engines perform on your site and the post itself to see if it is a reliable source and whether people will find your content valuable.
How does SEO blogging work?
Decide on a keyphrase or keyphrases – what is your post about? The keyphase I have chosen for this post is “SEO blogging” and that use of it will add to my keyphrase distribution. As well as appearing several times in the text it should also appear in the post title, meta description, several of the subheadings, and the alternative attributes for any images you include.
The content needs to be easy to read so viewers will want to stick around. There should be links – internal and external. This helps the search engine determine the credibility of the content. In order for a post to hold value, it usually needs to be above 300 words and contain at least 2 subheadings.
Why do we need to do it?
The simple answer is to increase site traffic and reader statistics.
Mummykind has, over the years, had an incredible readership. We also had seven writers actively promoting the site every day and one incredibly lucky viral pin on Pinterest. Our numbers have dwindled due to inactivity on our part and a reduction in team numbers. Several of us have gone on to have a second or even third child, most have started new jobs, so time has been stretched.
Any blogger will tell you that maintaining a website costs time and effort, but it also costs money. We have to pay for the domain and hosting. We are planning to add some advertisements to this site to monetize it enough to at least pay for its upkeep.
Google Adsense will not put advertisements on websites with ‘low content value’ – which we technically have. When we transferred from wordpress.com to wordpress.org some things got a little muddled. We had previously transferred from Blogger.com to wordpress, but we only had 30 or so posts at the time, and everything was easily solved. Now we have over 200 to contend with, and the muddling is a little worse. At the time of transfer we had nearly 700 broken links.
What do we need to do?
I have been going through each post and fixing them. This involves a lot of reformatting, proofreading and extra full stops. I hadn’t realised how convoluted our sentences were until I started redrafting old posts (yes, we were all guilty of it!). The most common issues I have had with our old content are:
- Impossibly long sentences – they need to be under 20 words as much as possible.
- No alternative attributes on images – SEO rankings include images, so title them!
- Outbound links – linking to another source increases your credibility.
- The title is too long – if it cant all appear in a search listing then it will rank lower.
- Keyphrases – none of us really knew how to use them effectively, we just wrote our thoughts.
Will SEO blogging change our content?
I am taking my time with the redrafting so our content retains its integrity. We still want it to have the heart and soul it always had. Mostly, I am adding subheadings, relinking broken links and replacing commas with full stops. Almost all of the writing has been left alone because the reformatting has done the trick. One or two of my own pieces have had a note added to let readers know how things turned out or if facts have changed.
The trickiest piece to redraft was Harriet’s Labour Story, for a few reasons. It is, by far, the longest post we have on here, and it is raw and emotional. I didn’t want to take that away. I managed to use subheadings as part of the story most of the time, so the flow hasn’t changed much.
So far, I have managed to do around a quarter to a third of the posts on the site, with plenty more to keep me busy over winter. I am also working on growing my graphic design business, Clover Gets Creative. It doesn’t leave me with much time to make new content.
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