How to get organic traffic on your new blog.

Table of contents

• How to remove WordPress ads from your blog.
• How to Optimize your blog for organic Google traffic.
• How to target easy-to-rank key words.
• How to make a table of contents manually.

I am a marketer by training and a healthy living enthusiast by heart. I wanted to create a space to blend my two passions and live with purpose, blogging made a lot of sense.

I decided to take weekly notes as to track my progress, hopefully one day someone else can use my notes on as a guideline. Here is a step by step guide on what I did during my second week as a blogger, if you have not read my first weeks journey as a blogger, click here, you should probably do it before reading this post or continuing here.

Here is my journey as a new blogger:

Week 5: How to remove WordPress ads from your blog

1K views a month is not spectacular but it is a good sign. It looked like what I’m doing has potential. So it was time to put more love on it.

Since it was still my first month I wanted to focus on the basics, getting my own domain and optimizing it in terms of content and SEO.

selected the starter plan and with this I went

From: naturalactivezen.Wordpress.com

To: naturalactivezen.com and naturalactivezen.blog

The starter plan removed all the WordPress ads from my page, and gave me my own landing page, I got an additional domain with “.blog” extension as well. Just because sometimes it makes more sense to share a .blog domain.

How to transition your blog to your own domain

The constant transition form a free domain to my own domain, gave me some hiccups that were annoying but easy to solve. First, I had to migrate all the content to the new landing. I just followed the instructions in WordPress and it was instantly solved. No big deal here. The only bad part was that all the likes from my first 4 weeks were lost.

Then, I tried to transfer all my followers to the new landing but I was not able to accomplish this step on my own. I had to request support, and in less than 12 hrs my ticket was resolved.

Week 6: How to Optimize your blog for organic Google traffic

The fist thing I did was to verify my site ownership on Google console, I inspected my URL on Google console and manually requested to index my landing and all the posts I had published so far.

This is not fun but extremely important for your SEO Strategy. If you want to improve your chances of showing up on a search, you have to manually request Google to crawl and index your blog.

It is a rather simple process, just follow google console steps. There are 2 possible answers. If your page is indexed there is nothing else to be done, but if your page is not indexed you will get the following message:

URL is not on Google

“This page is not indexed. Pages that aren’t indexed can’t be served on Google. See the details below to learn why it wasn’t indexed. Learn more”

The solution is to request the page to be indexed, right on the same screen, click on “request indexing”

Then, repeat the same process for each page on your site and index as many pages as possible. There is a daily limit of <11 requests so schedule some time to index new pages every day.

Content creation

My goal during was to get close to 30k words for relevance and to continue improving my SEO ranking. So continue focusing on your content, yes content is king.

Stay focused on generating great content, the more you write the better, as long as it is good quality in terms of engagement and SEO. make sure you follow all the steps from my post on week 1. Click here to read all the details.

Week 7: How to target easy-to-rank key words

So far I had been focusing on publishing good quality content, I had surpassed my goal of publishing my first 20k words, and I was on the path to 30k words. One word: consistency, that’s all it took.

In addition, I was strategically using my meta title and tags, Working on my back links, internal links, and social media. For details read my post on weeks 1 to 4, click here.

On week 7, I decided to focus on keywords for SEO. By then, there was enough time and data to optimize my blog. Here is the free tool that I used, there is no need to sign up, just enter your site and use the free report to your advantage during the next few days.

https://www.wordtracker.com

I Targeted key words that were easy to rank in Google, meaning the ones with low volume and low competition. But that also applied to my blog. The most important thing is to stay humble and relevant.

There were 3 keywords with 100 volume score and low organic competition that called my attention. As a next step, I went back to my posts and I did 3 things:

• I made some edits to have long form content with the keywords. The post were already on the subject but needed a bit of twisting to be more precise.
• I also used each word at least twice on the body of each post without exaggerating, otherwise it would have been flagged as keyword stuffing by the search engines.
• I entered the keywords on the meta tags when appropriate.

Week 8: How to make a table of contents manually.

I wanted to take my post to the next level so I focused on introducing tables of content when it made sense. Remember your job is to help Google to rank your blog, so use every resource available.

My coding skills are basic, and I had no access to plug ins with my WordPress plan, it was a manual task. But quite simple. Just follow my 3 steps to manually introduce tables of content to your blog:

1. Type your table of contents manually at the begging of the document.
2. Select the first heading or H2 tag that you want to link to the table of contents. Go to the block menu, under advanced, and name the HTML anchor. My first HTML anchor was “week-1”
3. Link the HTML anchor to the table of content by typing “#” and the corresponding HTML anchor. I used #week-1. Repeat the step as many times as needed, I used 4 HTML anchors.

👉do you have more tips? you are welcomed to collaborate as a guest blogger.

TBC, stay tuned for more tips in upcoming days…