SEO Archives - Page 2 of 2 - This Week in Blogging

SEO Best Practices with Gemma & Laura of Make Traffic Happen

February 20, 2023November 16, 2020

Gemma Laura Make Traffic Happen SEO For Bloggers

Unfortunately, Make Traffic Happen has shut its doors in 2023 after a long, successful run. While the site and products no longer exist, we are keeping this interview live for its valuable tips all the same.

When I first started blogging in 2010, I can assure you that SEO best practices were not at the forefront of my mind. In fact, my blog was little more than a public travel journal, and yet most of my articles still caught like wildfire. Fast forward to the present day, and that's far from the reality. In fact, at This Week in Blogging, we feel like it's not an overstatement to suggest that understanding search engine optimization (SEO) is vital for any content creator looking to find success in today's competitive landscape.

And Gemma and Laura have teamed up to try to ensure that they can help bloggers find that very success with SEO. In our previous interviews for bloggers, we've featured Bex talking about brand partnerships for bloggers, Ben talking about virtual assistants, and Bruno talking about sponsored content. Today, we're very fortunate to feature the expertise of a duo whose hard work has made a difference in the lives of many a blogger. So, before we get ahead of ourselves, who are Gemma and Laura?

Gemma and Laura are full-time bloggers, SEO consultants and content creators, with 10 websites between them, all of which are successful because of their SEO strategy, which they teach in their online course, SEO the Easy Way.

They manage an SEO and traffic generation website, Make Traffic Happen, and a free Facebook group for bloggers of all niches.

They started blogging separately in 2014 as travel bloggers. Their SEO success led them both to quit their jobs and become full-time bloggers.

How to Move Articles to a New Blog and Retain Rankings

January 16, 2021November 2, 2020

Many long-time bloggers are opening focused, niche blogs these days, and some may find that existing content on their first site may be much more relevant for their newer ventures. But if these articles are already receiving traffic on your main site, it certainly brings up a number of possible concerns on the best course of action to pursue.

This certainly happened to us.

On our travel blog, for example, we had many articles about wine tasting around the world (and tangential wine topics as it has always been a hobby of ours). When we started our wine blog, these were a better fit for the story we wanted to tell and we were left with the options of writing a new variant of the articles outright or simply copying them over. The same is true for my blogging advice articles on my travel blog as well. Now that I write here at This Week in Blogging, many of those articles simply make much more sense for them to live here.

Ultimately, the question we're tip-toeing around here is all about branding- specifically whether or not you are more likely to get more clicks on your original domain or on a more niche-specific one (especially in search results). It doesn't take a big leap to understand that my general travel blog called Living the Dream simply doesn't make sense to be home for blogging topics when a site like this one has better branding for it.

I opted to go the route of copying articles over to my new sites outright, and I have to admit I was a bit skeptical about what would happen. I ended up being pleasantly surprised.

Rank Math vs Yoast – Which SEO Plugin is Best for You?

October 12, 2020September 7, 2020

For many years, I used the Yoast plugin on my sites to help with SEO. The plugin is fairly straight forward, has a number of customization options, and, when it came to the tasks I wanted to accomplish, the plugin works beautifully.

Recently, a new SEO plugin has come out to the scene by the name of Rank Math and has been receiving rave reviews online.

Naturally, I was curious and decided to turn the plugin on for one of my newer blogs to see what it is all about. In this one, I thought it'd be fitting to compare the offerings between Rank Math and Yoast to help you decide if it is worth switching.

How to Use FAQ Schema to Improve Your Google Rankings

August 1, 2020July 30, 2020

Schema Markups have become a useful tool in your SEO arsenal in order to provide more data to the search engine in exchange for enhanced visibility in results.

One such schema is the FAQ markup where a list of generated questions can appear below your meta description. While Google's main reason for incorporating these is to likely keep people on Google and off your site, when done well it can increase your average position, take up more vertical space in SERPs, and improve your clicks as well.

In this one, I did a test with 50 articles split between two of my sites to see if using FAQ Schema is worth it.

How to See What Keywords Other Sites Rank For with Keysearch

July 20, 2020June 24, 2020

There are a number of novel ways to use the keyword research tool, Keysearch, to improve your SEO game. But sometimes one of the hardest parts of doing research is coming up with keyword ideas in the first place.

One of my favorites features of Keysearch (especially for my local blog where I compete with our tourist office, many local magazines, and news outlets), is that Keysearch actually lets you look at the keywords for any site on the internet- not just your own! This presents a number of opportunities where you can quite literally peer into other sites, find keywords they rank for, and get new ideas on what you may be able to target yourself.

In this guide, I'm going to share a step-by-step process of how you can do just that.