How can I improve my blog?

byKerryAnn61

3.5K followers

Updated 5 years ago

I have been working through the Affiliate Bootcamp and it is becoming obvious to me that I need to put a lot of work into my blog. I got started 18 months ago, posting maybe once sometimes twice a month and naturally Google hasn’t bothered with me.

I am trying to change all that.

Now I have started to post most days and have tried to put out better presented posts. I have some posts ready to go to ensure that when other commitments get in the way I shall have something that I can put together within a few minutes. I will be adding them to site content, sending to my blog, then change to draft, adding the photos and evaluating the layout, then set to publish in advance. Now I have a plan of action to ensure that I always have something ready to go.

The next post I put together will be done as soon as I finish this blog post.

What am I aiming to do?

I am trying to get Googles’ attention but when I look at my older posts I wonder if these will cause Google to bypass me thinking the site is a bit of a joke. I am trying to put together a plan of action to turn a blog of bits and pieces of drivel coming out of my fingertips, into a well presented one containing my thoughts and ideas. This is the theory, anyway.

I do cover a few niches, although the overlaying niche is one of being a digital nomad, travelling and trying to make money online. I aim to try and bring this into the format of my previous posts with the odd word, and tag to try and tie it all together.

The actions I am taking

I have reworked my categories trying to turn the keywords into better sounding and more informative titles.

Therefore, I have turned plain old “Caravan & Camping” into “Travel, Camping & Outdoors – a great adventure”. I have added some parent categories and sorted them a bit better.

I will be placing a categories widget on my home page and I hope that with better titles, this will entice readers to investigate further.

Analysis Paralysis.

I have started analysing my earlier posts by looking at them on the phone. This has shown up where the placement of photos is not ideal so that I can change the location if required.

I have just been making notes at this stage, as I will start working through them more thoroughly.

I aim to improve 5 posts each day when time allows. I have about 60 odd posts, so this will take a few weeks. But I feel it is better to do so now rather than wait till I have 100 posts.

This is my plan.

I am writing it down, in order to set my goal and make myself accountable.

• I have a word document and I am noting the name of each post, basic content, details of internal and external links and the URL (to easily link to instead of scrolling through the dashboard).
• I am then writing all my observations on this document. Some that I have started doing include things like fix tags, post into different category, move photo up/down/ into middle/ left/ make smaller etc.
• I will look at the main target keyword and add to Jaaxy and see if I can find a similar keyword structure to add in sentences and tags. By adding related keyword formats, I hope that my content will look informative within the ‘big’ keyword topic and that this may improve my ranking.
• I will add each target keyword phrase into AnswerThePublic, then download the excel sheet for later reviewing. This will also give ideas of different words to use when searching for headings as well as keywords in the future. As you can only do 5 a day as a free member, I will do this first. Even if I don’t manage to complete 5 blog posts, I will have a better selection of keyword phrases to add to Jaazy as I move forward.
• Obviously, I will check all links to make sure that they now go to the review page, rather than to the external site (as per the Bootcamp training to reduce external links). This may need some slight rewording of posts to ensure that the reader knows where the link will be taking them.
• I will improve my call to action at the base of every posts. I will ask for comments and ask to share using social media buttons.
• I need to upgrade the quality of my tags. Now I understand tags better thanks to the training, I will be improving the quality of these and I hope to make some that are more relevant to my overall niche theme as well, where it matches the content.
• Review and add internal links. Where I have written about a topic on two or three posts, I am adding internal links to these posts, by name, so that people can easily find more information relating to the topic. This is where the word document in item 1. above is useful.
• How can I show? I will try to see within each post, if I can add a screen shot or maybe later a video, showing rather than telling as per the training that I just did. Most of my photos are pretty useless, as they have been just to add something colourful. Likewise, my infographics have been mainly to have something to pin on social media.
• I will be adding one or two infographics, with the heading title, rather than the target keyword to mix it up a bit. I am keeping pictures to a minimum in order to speed up my website as it is quite slow at the moment.
• I need to improve the description of every image so that if it is shared to social media, a decent description relating to the topic of my post will carry across. I will also check the alt text to ensure that my main keyword is there but added in a slightly different way matching my headline keywording.
• Again, to reduce the speed I will be looking at the best plugins and reducing the amount I use.
• Many of my posts are under 1000 words, so I need to improve on these as I go through my analysis without just adding waffle. I noticed last week that I have one short post not indexed and the two posts I wrote after this are indexed. Obviously, word count does make a difference. I hope that by adding a few descriptive paragraphs referring to other related posts and adding a post link to will add that bit of extra text to make all the difference. Maybe there is the possibility of an introduction and conclusion paragraphs to add further text.
• Improve my headings. I will be trying to turn my existing headings into a question format rather than a statement where possible. I will analyse the paragraphs and see where I can do this, or even add a heading to make it into a question. Again, I have picked this up through the training.

I hope that as I move forward with the training, that I won’t find too many things that I have missed out on reviewing. I would hate to continually have to do this, although I guess the benefit is that Google likes to see websites add more and more content and these steps should help improve my appearance in that regard.

I hope that if anyone else is in the process of reviewing their website, this post will give you some ideas and tips that help you.

I would love it if anyone who has already done this would chip in and advise which areas appeared to make the most difference to improving their rankings.

All tips and help appreciated

Cheers

KerryAnn