This document provides guidance on search engine optimization (SEO) for blogs. It discusses why blogging and SEO are important, the types of content to create, how to do keyword research, applying SEO best practices to content, promoting posts, using WordPress plugins, measuring success, competitor research, repurposing content, maintenance tasks, and optimizing content for Google News. Key recommendations include defining objectives, producing evergreen and high-quality content, thorough keyword research, optimizing on-page elements, internal linking, promoting across social networks, analyzing analytics, and ongoing website maintenance.

1. SEO FOR BLOGS
STOP BLOGGING A DEAD HORSE

2. 14 years of search engine marketing
experience, worked with many large
organisations in Australia (both in-house and
agency side), in a broad range of industries
including: shopping, insurance, classified and
service websites.

3. AGENDA
• Blogging – Why are you doing it?
• SEO – Why do you need it?
• The types of content to create
• Do your research!
• Applying SEO practices
• Promote your posts!
• Wordpress plugins
• Measuring success
• Competitor Research
• Repurposing old articles
• Maintenance tasks
• Google News optimisation

4. BLOGGING – WHY ARE YOU DOING IT?

5. DEFINE OBJECTIVES / REQUIREMENTS
1. What are you trying to achieve?
Branding, sales, leads, signups, engagement, social followers
2. What types of content will you produce?
Evergreen, click-bait, sponsored, etc
3. Where will you source your traffic?
Organic search traffic, SEM, social media, referral traffic, email
4. Who is your target audience (demographic).
Location, Age, occupation, interests

6. SEO – WHY DO WE NEED IT

7. WHAT IS SEO?
Wikipedia Definition:
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the
visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural"
or un-paid ("organic") search results.
My Definition:
Gaining an understanding of the patterns and behaviours of
consumers through keyword research and then naturally
influencing search engine rankings through the creation of quality
and relevant content – removing any possible technical roadblocks
and taking advantage of newly supported technologies.

8. WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?
Organic search engine
traffic often contributes
the largest source of
traffic to a blog!

9. WHAT GOES INTO IT? A BASIC LOOK
Technical
Eliminating any roadblocks and
opportunities to SEO success
(Duplicate content, redirection issues,
schema markup, broken links)
Off-page
(The quality and quantity of links
to your website – on both a
domain and page level)
On-page
(Website content, title &
description tags, internal linking,
etc.)

10. WHAT GOES INTO IT? AN ADVANCED LOOK

11. WHAT GOES INTO IT? A SUPER ADVANCED LOOK

12. THE TYPES OF CONTENT TO CREATE

13. THE TYPES OF CONTENT
Content that has a search demand
Content that is likely to attract social shares

14. EVERGREEN CONTENT

15. EVERGREEN CONTENT
A well researched, thought out and SEO’d blog post can
deliver a significant amount of traffic to your site

16. DO YOUR RESEARCH!

17. WHAT IS KEYWORD RESEARCH?
Moz Definition:
“By researching your market's keyword demand, you can not only
learn which terms and phrases to target with SEO, but also learn
more about your customers as a whole.”
Wikipedia Definition:
• Generate a large number of terms that are highly relevant
• Involves brainstorming and the use of keyword research tools

18. OTHERWISE YOU ARE…

21. YOUNG BLINDFOLDED MAN HIS ARMS AND LOOKING FOR A WAY OUT

23. SO HOW DO
YOU DO IT?

24. WHERE TO START
Brainstorm keyword ideas – use past experience, personal
knowledge, Analytics, feedback, competitor inspiration, Google
Webmaster Tools, etc.

25. USING GOOGLE KEYWORD PLANNER

26. SELECTING YOUR OPTIONS

27. GETTING TRAFFIC DATA

28. FACTORING IN SEASONALITY

29. EXPORTING THE DATA INTO SOMETHING USABLE

30. NOW IT’S IN EXCEL!

31. GET CREATIVE WITH FILTERS AND FORMATTING

32. CATEGORISE YOUR DATA FOR ANALYSIS

33. WHO DOESN’T LOVE A GOOD PIVOT TABLE?!?

34. IT ALL PRETTY MUCH MAKES SENSE!

35. THE POWER OF EVER-GREEN CONTENT
Content with little search demand
Content that was researched and ranks highly in search engines

36. APPLYING SEO PRACTICES

37. MAJOR ON-PAGE RANKING FACTORS
Page URLs: Make sure URLs are clean, and try to utilise the keywords that the
page is trying to target within the file name. Use hyphens as separators.
Page Titles: Write a unique title tag for each page, using a combination of the
target keywords you’ve assigned to that page. Make sure the tag reads well and
entices customers to click on it.
Descriptions: Write a unique meta description tag for each webpage. Because
meta descriptions are commonly used on search engine result pages (SERPs), it
is recommended that you try include your chosen keywords.
Title
Description
Page URL

38. CONTENT FACTORS
Header Tags: Check that each page has one (and only one) h1 tag, preferably including the main
targeted keyword of the page. Additional header tags (h2 – h6) should appear in hierarchal
order.
Image Alt-tags: Make sure all of your images utilise ALT tags (a tag that lets you set text to be
shown if an image can’t be displayed). Simply write a few words that describe what the image is
about. Also, try and choose a descriptive image file name instead of random words and
numbers.

39. HOW TO DO THIS?
Title
Description
Page URL
Alt tags

40. DON’T FORGET INTERNAL LINKING!
When creating or repurposing content, look to cross-promote / link from other areas of the
website and past articles for SEO gain. Not only do these links help the new article get
indexed and pass link authority to help them rank better, but it also provides an entry point
to the new page.
A good place to start is simply by doing a keyword search on your blog.

41. REMEMBER TO PROMOTE YOUR POSTS!

42. BUFFER
Buffer is the easiest way to publish on social media

43. HOOTSUITE
Manage social networks, schedule messages, engage your audiences, and measure ROI right
from the dashboard.

44. HOOTSUITE

45. REDDIT
Entertainment, social networking and news website where registered community members
can submit content. Users can then vote "up" or "down" to organize the posts and determine
their position on the site's pages.

46. Lucky I got the window seat!
5,610 views
Yosemite National Park
10,988 views
My Cat in the Hat
1,137 views
I think the meeting room is
much better now
1,025 views

47. WORDPRESS PLUGINS

48. PLUGIN CHECKLIST
- SEO Functionality: Control over every pages title, description and H1 tags,
canonical tags, noindex tags, etc
- XML Sitemap: Automatic updates based on content updates
- HTML Sitemap: Automatic updates based on pages changes
- Security: Blocks malicious activity – Login attempts, comment spam, etc
- Broken Link Checker: Scans for website for outdated links
- Social Bookmarking: Allow users to easily share your content
- Open Graph / Twitter Cards: Ensure that your pages look attractive when
shared on social media
- Compression / Minify / Caching: On the fly changes to reduce page weight /
improve your page loading times

49. WORDPRESS SEO PLUGIN
Easily optimize your WordPress site with one plugin; covering such things as titles
and meta descriptions, Robots Meta configuration, Canonical tags, Breadcrumbs,
Permalink clean up, XML Sitemaps, Edit your robots.txt and .htaccess, Clean up
head section and Opengraph tags & Twitter cards.

50. W3 TOTAL CACHE
After road-testing several plugins by looking at their configuration options, their
functionality, pagespeed scores and page loading times, I settled on W3 Total Cache
for their manual control of Javascript minifying and deferring and cache settings.
Here are some of the key benefits of these plugins:

51. EWWW IMAGE OPTIMISER
A great free and easy to use Wordpress Plugin that bulk optimises your existing
images files and new optimises new images on the fly.

52. REDIRECTIONS
I also utilise a plugin that logs all 404 errors and easily lets me implement 301
redirects to stop users from trying to access those files in the future. I also block
their IPs if they apparent to be sniffing for file vulnerabilities.

53. WORDFENCE FIREWALL
There is a built-in firewall that automatically blocks IPs based on certain triggers
(accessing the site too quickly, using a username that doesn’t exist, etc)

54. WORDFENCE IP BLOCKING
I have been blocking whole countries from accessing my websites, along with
individual IPs that have tried accessing my admin panel and those who were
obviously not human visitors (crawling my website too quickly, but not a search
engine)

55. MEASURING SUCCESS

56. SO WHAT DOES SUCCESS LOOK LIKE?

57. SO WHAT DOES SUCCESS LOOK LIKE?

58. SO WHAT DOES SUCCESS LOOK LIKE?

59. SO WHAT DOES SUCCESS LOOK LIKE?

60. OR IS IT MONEY?

61. OR IS IT SOCIAL FOLLOWERS?

62. OR USER ENGAGEMENT?
“Oh my goodness! Awesome
article dude! Many thanks,
However I am experiencing
difficulties with your RSS.
I don’t understand the reason why
I can’t join
it. Is there anybody else getting
identical RSS problems?
Anyone that knows the solution
will you kindly respond?
Thanks!!”

63. WHATEVER IT IS, MAKE SURE YOU KNOW!

64. CHECK YOUR ANALYTICS!
Review your own content in your website analytics and analyse pageviews, average
time on site, bounce rate metrics, as well as look at social media shares and post
engagement. This can also be segmented out by traffic source to understand how
users reached the pages.

65. WHAT WAS ENGAGED WITH THE MOST?
Once you have the URL list, use something like “SEO Tools For Excel” to scrape the
total amount of social shares for the main social media platforms.

66. AHREFS DOES THIS TOO…

67. LOOK AT WEBSITES THAT LINKED TO THE ARTICLE
You can also look at the quantity and quality of other websites that link directly to
your blog posts.

68. LOOK AT SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT
You can also look at the quantity and quality of other websites that link directly to
your blog posts.

69. COMPETITOR RESEARCH

70. ANALYSE WHAT THE COMPETITION PUBLISHES
For ideas and also to analyse your competitors success, you simply crawl their blog
/ news in Screaming Frog to harvest a list of URLs, and use similar practices to what
I have covered – most of the data is publically viewable!

71. BUZZSUMO
With a simple keyword search, you can find the most socially popular articles over
each social media platform, for a desired time frame.

72. REPURPOSING OLD ARTICLES

73. LOOK FOR CONTENT WITH A LOT OF VISIBILITY
A good start when determining content to repurpose is to use GWT data and look
for content that has a lot of impressions and clicks, as well as ones with a low
proportion of clicks (a low CTR and high avg. position)

74. REVIEWING OTHER KEYWORDS
Using keyword planner data and that within GWT, look for keyword opportunities
where we could improve rankings. The slightest increase in rankings can yield a
significant increase in CTR and traffic.

75. REPURPOSING IDEAS
• Consider changing the focus
• Check SEO practices
• Check existing links and link out to anything new of
relevance
• Add more content
• Re-post and re-promote

76. MAINTENANCE TASKS

77. MAINTENANCE TASKS
Software / Plugin Updates – Be sure to update your core CMS and plugin files
when they become available. A lot of the time these newer versions fix bugs &
security issues, but they also come with new functions / technology.
Moderate comments – Considering we don’t have don’t comments enabled on the
website, it’s weird to why we are accumulating comments in the backend. Not only
is it bloating the database, but it’s a waste of server resources.

78. MAINTENANCE TASKS
Analytics: In order to determine how your website is performing and measuring
how they are getting there, you need to regularly check your website analytics.
Things to check are your conversions, event tracking, acquisition sources, user
behaviour, etc.
Ranking Reports: Additional to the above, I recommend you keep an eye on how
your website is ranking within search engines for your targeted keyword list. This
will usually show movement before you see anything major in your analytics, you
can track your competitors success, as well as being able to establish traffic
fluctuations.
Webmaster Tools: Make sure you check your webmaster tools accounts for such
things as broken links, duplicate tag issues, links pointing towards your website,
crawl stats, security issues and search queries you are showing for.

79. MAINTENANCE TASKS
Link Check: Additional to checking the above, I recommend that you check all of
the links on your website with either a stand-alone tool or a plugin. You’ll find that
other websites may have changed their URLs, resulting in 404 errors.
Backing Up Your Website – To make sure you don’t risk losing any part of your
website if something happens to your web host or if your website is hacked, I highly
recommend backing up your files and database to a cloud based storage solution
(e.g. Dropbox).
Monitor Website Outages – Use one of the many website monitoring services
(Pingdom) to keep an eye on the uptime of your website. A lot of the time you’ll get
an email if things go down, and you can promptly follow up with your hosting
company.

80. GOOGLE NEWS OPTIMISATION

81. GOOGLE NEWS IN THE SERPS
You want to
be here!

82. WHAT DO YOU NEED TO DO ONCE IT’S UP?
Title tag
Description
Article title

83. WHAT DO YOU NEED TO DO ONCE IT’S UP?
Google new genre
Meta news keywords

84. WHAT DO YOU NEED TO DO ONCE IT’S UP?
Editor’s picks
Standout Tag

85. WHAT ARE THOSE?
If you break a big story or publish an extraordinary work of journalism, you can
indicate this by using the standout tag. Consider whether the article meets the
following criteria:
- Your article is an original source for the story.
- Your organization invested significant resources in reporting or producing the
article
- The article deserves special recognition.
- You haven't used standout on your own articles more than seven times in the past
calendar week.
Editors' Picks enables you to provide up to five links to original news content you
believe represents your organization’s best journalistic work at any given moment,
and potentially have it displayed on the Google News homepage or select section
pages. Do not include links to subscription offers, how-to articles, stock quotes,
classified ads, weather forecasts, or the like.

86. THANK YOU!
holidaypoint.com.au
HolidayPointAU
@HolidayPointAU
+HolidaypointAu