Monday, September 20, 2021

Simple and free SEO for your blog, website, online work

Promoting your own creative work, isn't selling out, it's just sharing.  If you want people to see, read, watch, or experience it, then you have to let them know.  This is a sarcastic Sharpie doodle I did a while back.  

If you do any kind of work online, like blog, write articles, upload music, a You Tube channel, an Etsy or eBay store, asmall business website, whatever, then you know those three frustrating letters. SEO.  Yep, Search Engine Optimization.  It sounds scary, even daunting.  People think the evil algorithms are out to push their online work to the edge of the cyber world and crush their dreams. 

In the last couple years, there's been a huge upswing in free speech suppression, censoring, and there are some truly evil intended algorithms in places, it seems.  But generally speaking, it's still not really hard to get your web page, whatever kind of site it is, to rise up in Google and Bing rankings.  In the last 13 years, I've started over 25 blogs, written over 2,400 blog posts, on personal blogs, and pulled in over 439,000 page views.  This blog post details that.  So while I haven't made money directly from my blogs, I have got the SEO part pretty well down.  So here's my #1 idea:

Put 20 links from a blog or other website of yours to your new blog.  

Seriously, that's it.  I started learning about SEO in 2009, and this has been my Go To starting SEO technique since then.  Most of my blogs are LOCKED in the #1 spot on the first page of Google results.  Same with Bing, though I never use Bing.  Check for yourself:  Steve Emig: The White Bear, Crazy California 43, #sharpiescribblestyle (my sharpie art hashtag,which I OWN, use "images"in the search), Welcome to Dystopia: The Future is Now, Book 1, Block Bikes Blog, Freestyle BMX Tales.  Those are all my work.  Locked in the #1 spot.  

If you have a blog already (and you should have a personal blog for this reason alone, if no other), then just go into your blog posts.  Either go into your most popular posts, or the last 20 on your blog.  Somewhere in the blog post, simply add something like:  "Hey, I have a new blog called _____________, check it out."  Link that whole line to your new blog, website, online store, whatever.  Do that 5 or 10 times, each day, until you've got 20 links from your blog to your new site.  

Then just let it set, and keep working on the new site.  As the "spiders," or whatever they are, crawl through the internet's data, they'll see those links, and your new site will rise slowly up the ranks.  You can usually be on the first page of Google results in 1-2 weeks.  It usually takes 1-3 months to hit the #1 spot, depending how entrenched the current #1 is.  You may bounce around the top 3 or 4 spots for a while.  But if you keep blogging, or updating your website, you'll eventually LOCK into the #1 spot. 

If you don't have a website or blog to link FROM, to your new site.  Go to Blogger, and start a personal blog.  It takes about 3 minutes to start a blog.  It takes a little time to pick a theme, and do the basic design.  If you have something you want to blog about, then do that theme for your blog.  If you're just starting a blog to use for backlinks, then do 20 posts of something.  "My 20 biggest fishing catches."  "My 20 favorite vacation photos."  "The 20 best photos of my cat" (kid, aardvark, llama, '57 Chevy, dogsled, whatever).  Take the time to create a Blogger blog with 20 posts, and put a photos and 1 or 2 sentences about the photo, on each post.  That's all you need.  If you don't know how to do any part of that, go to YouTube, and look up a How-to video.  That's how I learned this shit, and I was a digitally retarded, and a Luddite back in 2008, when I got started. 

Once you do this, you have a blog with 20 posts sitting out there on the interwebs.  Anytime you need to promote a new site, put one link from each post on that blog to your new site, over 2-4 days.  Then wait.  That's it.  The algorithms go to work... for you.  Seriously, that's the biggest part of SEO... for anything.  

As you do more blog posts or update your new website, link to it from your various social media pages, and wherever else.  More links help, as time goes on.  But 20 good backlinks, from your own site, is all you need to start getting a site moving up the ranks.  Now get to it.  You're welcome. 

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