Introduction
If you are looking for a primer in SEO when it comes to do your Steemit.com blog, you are at the right place. I have been doing an SEO case study lately that forced me to revisit the "fundamentals". This series of posts is specifically targeted to people who wants to:
- Drive massive amount of traffic
- Dominate their niche
- Become a source of valuable DOFOLLOW backlinks that people would pay for
- Create multiple stream of income via their steemit.com blogs
This post is NOT for people who:
- Just want to blog about everything under the sun
- Just want STEEM payout
- Don't blog on a regular basis
I will assume that people who want to have an SEO optimized blog will open an account from scratch to go after highly valued keywords. If you are brand new and wonder what I mean by creating multiple streams of income via steemit, read this article.
Start at the Beginning
It may seem that what I am writing below is not about backlinks or fancy strategies to increase page authority and therefore isn't related to SEO. That would be a mistake. If you overlook these steps you are building your blog on a foundation of sand. You want the foundations of your blog to be rock solid so that your efforts yield maximum results in the future...right?.
Step 1 - Define Your Niche
Before a single word is written on your blog, you have to decide what your blog will be about. You have to decide what will be your niche. Why? Because people search the Internet for one reason: to solve a problem.
That problem may be to find find friends, have fun, or it may be to answer a question. It could be anything. But when readers are looking to solve a problem and your blog is nothing but ramblings on unrelated topics, how is your blog going to solve their problem?
Also, we want to be able to connect your posts to each other in a coherent manner so that the search engine KNOWS that your blog is there to solve someone's problem.
Step 2 - Know Your Niche
There are two part to knowing your niche.
Know the Lingo of Your Niche
In order for people to care or read your article, they must know that you are speaking to them in the language they understand. If you do this, people will read your article all the way through and consult other parts of your blog.
If you chose your niche right, you chose something you are passionate about and/or know inside and out. This part shouldn't be tough. If you chose something you know nothing about, consider going after another niche because you will have a much harder time at writing. Don't make your work harder than it needs to be.
Keyword Research
Keyword research will help you pull out all the major keywords of your niche. Go to google keyword planner and start looking for what people are looking for in your niche.
Use a note taking app such as Evernote to compile what you find.
Step 3 - Build Your Blog Architecture
Now that you know what you are blogging about, that you know the lingo and the main keywords people are looking for, you have to define how you are going to plan your work.
Your content has to be relevant in a context. Your blog may cover multiple topics around a major topic. For example, in my casestudy, I write about a little fishing town called Ucluelet.
Here are some major topics related to my niche:
1- Things to do in Ucluelet
2- Ucluelet Real Estate
3- Ucluelet Accommodations
They are in some way related to each other but most of the time, when I write I will be doing internal links to related articles within a certain "silo". Here is a brief sketch to illustrate the point:
The content go much deeper than that but it is just there to illustrate a point. You have to think about your blog in an holistic matter about how each piece of content relate to each other.
Conclusion
There is much more I will be covering about internal links in part 2, but this is good enough to get to work and start planning your SEO machine.
Steem On Steemians!
The website/blog architecture is so important like you mentioned in terms of how SEO link-juice would flow throughout the site. I did this a bunch with some of my affiliate sites back when I was doing niche websites.
Yes. It's very important IF you want to do more than get blog payout via STEEM. Maybe in the future, there will be a function to rewards steem blogposts that ranks high for keywords.
Ohh that would be a neat feature.
Simply brilliant @cryptoctopus. I do have a website to educate and assess to the Spanish community about Cryptocurrency and I appreciate all this kind of useful articles :) I'm gonna apply these steps and I'm looking forward for the second part. Thanks!
Thanks! I will keep on with this series :-)
Steemit seems to naturally have good SEO. Every time I try and search a Steem article on Google, it's always right at the top.
Indeed! :) for sure it won't hurt if we optimize it more :)
This is true - but I recently found out each post needs to have approximately a $10 payout in order to be found by search. Your posts with under those earnings will not rank.
I joined for the Alexa ranking and I'm glad it is not cluttered with "bad" posts. Getting to the $10 threshold with my posts is my current goal.
I am definitely using this series to help me and so grateful to have it.
You are a genius @cryptoctopus . I'm actually educating the Muslim community on cryptocurrency as well as brining them on board .
Great work
Your post has very good information @cryptoctopus
This brings me back to the days of trying to get my own blog up and running. I can't tell you how many hours I spent trying to create a web of links back to my blog from "active sources", all tied around a single keyword or set of keywords.
I won't lie, I HATED it and it ultimately ended up being a waste of time, as I ended up not being as dedicated to seeing it succeed as I had first envisioned.
Maybe this time will be different?
In any case, thanks for this valuable info.
at least, in the meanwhile you can get paid in STEEM. :-)
Very true. Pretty much a win-win situation :)
Plenty to absorb, thanx.
Interesting. I will bookmark this for later. I really need to look into keywords in particular in more depth.
Loved the way you had examples, to let people understand your thought process better. Brainstorming concepts for your blog is a great idea, so people know what you are about. Thanks again.
I think I am finally getting your point on this. So much depends on what someone wants to do with their blog and how narrow that niche needs to be. I like the wide-ranging social aspect of Steemit, but that seems at odds with the SEO.
You are the exact person who came to mind for me on this topic since you do stay on niche for the most part (good job). I'm in many niches and this is going to be an issue for me, I think. I do health, social media, art and travel lol. So random but that's my life. I think I may stick with health here, but not sure at all.
the article you create is very nice, I immediately understood it
Thank you to have shared @cryptoctopus
Your efforts are much appreciated but the internet is filled with these kind of things, and seo for steemit and other sites is the same @cryptoctopus
@cryptoctopus You've earned my upvote and I resteemed your content because it's worth it. keep it up!
Wow awesome great article this surely helps all steemians to maintain their blog posts clean and beautiful like yours.
meep
very informative article its may help us for improve our progress in our blogs thanx @cryptoctopus
Certainly enjoyable reading . Thanks for posting.
Thank you for the info. I'm a true novice and appreciate how you've broken the points down for better understanding.
Good idea to build a "blog architecture"... How far in advance would you advise people plan out their posts? One month at a time, more or less than that?
I blog elsewhere and do this a bit on the fly, but it comes together as you work it.
Keep a list of possible posts - add to it constantly.
Schedule out the best for a given week and get those going
Pull the second out for week two
Keep adding ideas and producing the content and eventually you end up with a month, quarter or years scheduled - depending upon what you do.
For example, I am working on Halloween right now for some of my places. Christmas and associated holiday posts are coming along. I do weight loss, so I'm also working on my January posts now as well.
A second example - I post 2 "inspirational" posts a week in one place. I have enough of those posts ready for months to come. I make them up as I see them and sometimes move them around a bit - but they are there when I need them.
I hope this helps :)
I am working on a blog website, and this is exactly what I needed, thanks, looking forward for more posts like this
Deep stuff. I have a lot to learn; I always had this vaguely skeevy impression of SEO. Of course, that was before I came across Steemit and actually started seeking to earn from it.
Consider yourself followed.
Excellent post. Amazing. Well done. I'll follow your account to see how you doing. because i also want earnings as you. @yash0108
This is a great description of proper article architecture for maximum SEO. Thanks @cryptoctopus ! I'm looking forward to part 2 so I can improve my blog even more.
Very Informative post :D
Solid SEO insight for beginner blogs here, i liked how you broke down the topics in a spider chart. I will have to try that with my own blog. Thanks!
I agree - this is awesome and I have not see it done this way before in my six years of internet work. I'm very excited to try it for my topics. I wish I only had one!
"Just want to blog about everything under the sun"
definitely not for me haha
apologise for a bit of a self advertisement, but my page is pretty much a graveyard, would be glad if you took a look :)
https://steemit.com/throwback/@josephd/throwback-to-my-older-posts
Très bon article qui est très bien fait de votre part. Merci
I've been in ucluelet ;-). Canada bc
2 years ago. Summer vacation.
Very Informative post. Appreciation from my side
Great post, surely will help new steemers :)
Nice post
Steemit seems to naturally have good SEO. Every time I try and search a Steem article on Google, it's always right at the top.
thanks for sharing @cryptoctopus
Really great source of information for Steemit SEO. Can you please tell me how to and which tags should be used for the maximum exposure on Steemit?
Thank you! Actually, I didn't have much idea about the SEO on Steemit!
But it seems like this part of the SEO lesson teaches us that we need to stick to a kind of topic. Which is actually a must for most blog is they want targeted traffic obviously.
Thanks a lot for sharing this post with us. It has helped a lot to understand.
That structure is really helpful! Thank you
Muy buena iniciativa, voy a leerlos todos aplicarlos y a seguirte para mi esta es una grata experiencia tengo mucho que aprender mientas me divierto¡