Writing a quality content for your blog is just half the effort in setting up your blog. After it has been published, your next concern is its visibility to search engines to reach your audience which helps increase your traffic and allows you to monetize your blog. If your blog is still in its infancy, then you come to the right place. These are the steps on how you set up your blog starting from the scratch.
1. Get your own domain.
There are several domain hosting to choose from but the most popular are GoDaddy, Hostgator, and Bluehost. Getting your own domain shows how serious you are in blogging. Custom domains reduces your SEO efforts and builds your authority and credibility. For example, when you buy your own domain at GoDaddy, you have the option to pay for SEO optimization to improve your rank on Goggle and other search engines.
2. Connect your blog to Google Analytics. Google Analytics allows you to track your blog traffic and determines the behavior of your site's performance. Here's how you connect your blog:
a. Sign up for Google Analytics account.
b. Find your Analytics Tracking ID.
c. Open your Blogger account.
d. Paste your Analytics Tracking ID in your Blogger account.
3. Set up Google Search Console account.
Google Search Console is a free tool offered by Google to help website owners monitor and maintain their site’s presence in Google search results. It provides essential data that you need to start tracking from day one. It also alerts you about errors, security issues, and indexing problems that may affect your website’s search rankings.
4. Add sitemap to your Google Search Console account. Submitting your sitemap to Google Search Console helps Google find and index valuable pages on your site. This is used by search engines like Google and Bing to index your site so that your store's pages appear in search results.
How to generate sitemap to your Blogger account:
Type or add robots.txt after your url as shown below.
Copy the generated sitemap to your blogger account as shown below.
5. Use Alt Text for Images. Alt text (alternative text), also known as "alt attributes", “alt descriptions", or technically incorrectly as "alt tags,” are used within an HTML code to describe the appearance and function of an image on a page. In terms of web accessibility, adding alternative text to photos is first and foremost the most important thing to do. Visually impaired users using screen readers will be read an alt attribute to better understand an on-page image. Alt tags provide better image context/descriptions to search engine crawlers, helping them to index an image properly.
Good: <img src="creditcards.png" alt="creditcards">
Great: <img src="creditcards.png" alt="stack credit cards">
6. Promote your content in your title and meta description. Craft a readable, compelling description using important keywords can improve the click-through rate for a given webpage. Treat your meta description like your advertisement in the search results. It won’t always show up as sometimes Google picks out text from your page that matches the query better. But when it does, a beautifully-written description can snatch you some extra clicks. The title of your blog should have at least 100 characters and meta description should have at least 150 characters. You may check to the web to check for page title and meta description visibility.
