10 Universal Tips to Lift Your Blog to Professional level

Lifting a blog to upper level is a continuous process. When your blog reaches a modest level, it will itself show where to go; where is its own way.

However first of all, you must know the universal techniques how you can make your blog rise to a standard level overcoming the limitation of starting-up. Here we’re going to share such 10 universal extensive tips to drive your WordPress blog onward.

Previously we contributed several articles on starting WordPress blog and essential primary development methods to give it an upper status. If you’ve covered-up all of these or you’re knowledgeable enough to understand the previous steps; then, this is the right place for you.

If you’re beginner, just check-out from the following list where you’re along the way to WordPress blogging tour in this seven-post series –

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Most influential WordPress-blog advancement tips

Not that, all these Points are applicable for any blogger. This is chalked-out especially for the professional bloggers who aim (through this labor) to gather huge traffic; specifically, to establish a brand name; more specifically, to draw out crude-benefits; and harshly speaking, to earn money.

However under the present subject, we’re going to focus on the following topics-

1. Ensure Search Engine Visibility
2. Build-up SEO strategy
3. Chalk out Content Marketing system
4. Make the Best use of Social Media
5. Implement ‘Content is King’ policy
6. Ensure multi-level Site’s security
7. Pay special attention to Stat Analysis
8. Ensure tolerable user experience
9. Utilize Tools most possible way
10. Be trustworthy

So, let’s proceed step by step–

If you already accomplished the previous steps or, in other word, your blog/site is live and you started Posting, it is high time you brought your site’s presence to notice of the Major Search Engines like Google, Yahoo etc. You cannot think of making a site stand-out without help of Search Engine or Search Engine Organic-traffic.

It is not easy to get your site’s URL positioned on top page of Reach Result. It may take months or years of unhindered efforts to do this. But initially you have to ensure that your site is listed in top Search Engines and your URLs get indexed so that they could be visible in Search Engine whatever position they attain (in 1st page or 20th page) in search result.

For this, you have to submit your site to different Search Engines separately. However, you can do the same tasks by the help of different SEO plugins like Yoast SEO by little or no efforts. But it is essential that you learn the manual process yourself. This will make you knowledgeable of the fact which will ultimately grow your confidence to face probable future challenges.

At the initial stage, you can choose to submit your blog to the following Search Engines–

• Google
• Yahoo/Bing combined platform
• Baidu (China-based SE)
• Yandex (Russia-based SE)

But first of all, you can target Google as about 90% of the Internet users globally use Google Search to find their desired contents.

On submission, Search Engine will start indexing your site and show your pages as Search Result in SERP (Search Engine Result Page) in response to Keyword search by users.

The efforts that you employ to make Search Engine work in your favor to lift your site/page upper in Search Result compared to your competitors’ is called SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Though Search Engines always prescribe to the webmaster, ‘Don’t write for Search Engine, write for the visitors’, common practice is that webmasters budget a great portion of his/her efforts, time and money to fight on the SEO battleground, in many cases, illegal way.

It appears that those who are big guns in the SEO industry are the most successful persons (in respect of earning). So, you can take it for sure that if you are careless of SEO, you’re likely to get lost in deeper darkness of Search Engines ocean.

There runs an invisible ‘tug of war’ between Search Engine and Seo-hunters. As Search Engine (here Google) declares they consider Linking and Keyword as the Ranking factors, SEO hackers start blind competition with intentional link building tricks and offensive SEO practice like ‘Keyword stuffing’ to get higher rank. This is the reason why Google frequently changes ‘Ranking algorithm’ by Panda and Penguin update to resist from Rank snatching and to ensure that poor-quality content cannot over-occupy top position in SERP.

Hope you could draw a background-picture of SEO world on mind through reading this observation.

However, as you cannot but practice SEO, you must have general know-how and a good understanding of the influential ranking factors upon which you can build your SEO strategy. This is what we’re walking you through.

All the SEO is practiced dividing it into three categories. They are-

• On-page SEO: The SEO that you apply within your post, page and site. This includes- Internal linking, Keyword, Content quality etc.
• Off-page SEO: Your SEO campaign led outside your webpage to draw Google’s attention. This includes Backlink, Site-submission etc.
• Technical SEO: There are some other factors that Google takes into account to rank your site such as overall performance of a site, site speed, existing traffic flow etc. These fall into technical category of SEO.

Here are the most dominant SEO factors category-wise that matter to rank a webpage higher in Google-

On-page SEO

• Keyword fix-up: It is necessary to determine a Keyword for your post. This means you will develop your post centering round a keyword. This signals Search Engine what your post is about. But it is a bad practice to use too many Keyword intentionally to draw Search Engine’s attention. For this you might be accused of the offense ‘Keyword stuffing’ which goes under ‘Black-hat SEO’.
• Content quality: Content must be of better quality if you want to surpass your competitors in the race of Search Engine ranking. Search Engine always prompts webmasters to publish Unique Content.
• URL Structure: Your post URL structure needs to be descriptive and worded with Keyword. This will tell what your post is about and it will be easily recognizable by SE.
• Title and Header tag: Your Title (SEO Title) and Header need to be worded with Keyword which is obviously SEO-friendly.
• Meta Description: Meta description which you can apply post-wise by using SEO plugin must summarize the overall story of your post. Meta description is displayed below post title in SERP. A good meta description might be user-alluring as well as favorable for ranking.
• Image optimization: Image can be optimized for SE by using keyword-focusing Title, description and Alt-tag. Properly-optimized image increase your chance to get additional traffic from Google Image Search.

Off-page SEO

• Backlink: By building up quality Backlink, you can collect huge number of Referral Traffic. This is something like, the more backlinks, the more traffic. There are numerous ways and tricks for link-building. And SEO seekers are always seen trying desperately to set an inbound links on others’ sites particularly of the same niches. Do-follow Backlink from a same niched influential site sends positive signals to Search Engine about ranking. Note that due to misuse of Backlink factor, Google has minimized the influence of Backlink in Ranking process from its Hummingbird update.
• URL Submission: As part of your Off-page SEO practice, you can submit your site’s URL in different URL submission or Directory submission site from where you can expect referral traffic. But effectiveness of such efforts isn’t beyond question nowadays.
• Social Media connection: Social Media is always a hot-spot for your site to collect huge number of Social traffic out of Search Engine. But Social Media linking also signals positively to SE in favor of Ranking. The motivating fact is that you have boundless scope to gather Social Media traffic even when your site is victim of Search Engine’s negligence.
• Guest Posting: XXX

Technical SEO

• Site’s security: This term denotes whether your domain protocol is secured or not. In other word, whether your site’s domain is http (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) or https (Hypertext Transfer Protocol secure). For overall security of your site your domain should be encrypted with https protocol. To learn the difference between http and https and how to get https, follow our tutorial- HTTP: The Web Protocol You cannot Avoid Knowing.
• Site and page speed: Site and Page loading time is a great factor for SEO. There are several reasons for slowness of site and pages. Some of them are large volume of images, excessive flash contents, un-updated and poorly-cooded plugins, too much http requests, use of Javascript, Absence of caching technique etc. However as per your situation, you should fix up your own SEO strategy regarding loading time.
• Mobile Usability: If your site is optimized for mobile device, it carries extra value in SEO.
• User experience: User-experience also counts as ranking factors. This includes Responsiveness, loading time, navigation system, site structure etc. However, we clarified about User-experience in the ‘Ensure tolerable user experience’ section of this post.
• Internal linking: Internal linking which is one of the most important SEO factors involves linking between and among Posts and sections of the same website. Easily navigable linking from and to posts and categories not only help SE index a site or pages easily and quickly, it is also essential to ensure pleasant user-experiences. In both cases, you acquire SEO benefits. SO, you have to chalk-out your SEO strategy keeping an eye to this factor.

It is not that all have to lay equal emphasis on all the things stated so far. It is you who best know, what and to what extent you should practice. It also largely depends on the mission and vision of your site or blog. So, Considering everything; hit upon your own SEO strategy.

You’re a manufacturer. Suppose, you produced a good quality of detergent powder named ‘Washout’. You just produced, supplied it to market and it started selling like hotcake. Reality is not so.

However much good your product is, it is not tested by various marketing parameters. So, it is highly not likely to start selling instantly. In order to make Washout a profit-drawing commodity, probably you need to consider the followings-

• Targeting consumer-base
• Producing things so their demands are fulfilled.
• Producing better thing compared to your competitors
• Costing less compared to the similar product of the competitors
• Promoting the product through different media
• Acquiring their trustworthiness
• Waiting to extract net profit out of it

This is, in brief, called Marketing. This is the Marketing System. Here lies the Marketing Strategies that will make your product bring money on regular basis some day.

Same dictum goes in case of Content Marketing. Just publishing a content devoid of marketing system and strategy might turn this like a file stored in Hard Drive of your computer.

Visitors usually land on your page due to exact information not to view ads. So whether you’re beginners or advanced, you must have a Content Marketing strategy of your own.

If you have an intensive look at the above example, you find that Marketing (content or any product) involves both production and selling. So, in case of content, you must have definite strategies both for creating content in target of definite readers-base as well as promoting the content to draw expected visitors. Unless you earn (revenue of conversion), your content is of no use.

Now let’s see at a glance what benefits can content marketing give. By adopting content marketing strategies-

• You can earn more revenue or conversion.
• You can increase brand reputation.
• You have chance of more visibility of your content in Search Engine.
• More social traffic and consequently more popularity of your site.
• Domain Authority of your site can be improved.

Now let’s have a look at what are the strategies can you take for marketing your content to grasp all the benefits stated above-

• Launching keyword research for a definite content.
• Making an overall plan of content before writing.
• To be specific in providing information; make it live, logical and visual by graph, stats, data, image and other media.
• Reflecting your brand voice.
• Using tricks to transparent complicated issue.
• Answer the vague question lies in deeper in readers’ mind.
• Promote content most possible ways.
• Evaluate your content by statistical data and remarket it.

In course of your SEO struggle, Social Media can be a great source of Referral traffic. If you’re not sure of different types of traffic, follow this link.

At the initial stage, Social Media might be essential to turn visitors your-site-oriented. This is because, Search Engine won’t respect your URLs unless you try month after month and even year. So you cannot expect Search Engine traffic. One of the strong reasons for not coming SE traffic is lack of visitors in the site. So what is the sum?

You don’t get visitors as SE doesn’t provide; again SE doesn’t provide as you have no visitors. To break this tie, Social Media might be a good settler.

As SE traffic is captured by ‘SEO Politics’ many opines not to depend on SE traffic but Social Media traffic.

However, There are unlimited source, ways and probabilities of tracking Social Media traffic. Through these networks, you can share links with image, graphics and video. Even you publish and republish the entire post. However for better you can target the following social media networking sites among numerous probabilities-

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Youtube
• Pinterest
• Tumblr
• Reddit
• Linkedin
• Quora
• Instagram
• Medium

‘Content is king‘- how this statement came; Bill Gates or who coined this- is not our matter of interest. We just want to say that Content is like a King or Emperor or President. In other word, emphasis should be laid on Content. If your blog or site is a manufacturing company, Content is the product. So you must be most caring of and strategic in producing a product or writing a Content.

As an idea ‘Content is king‘ is, to much extent, associated with Content Marketing. But here in this step, we’re taking just the gist of the statement and going to focus on the importance and authority of the Content in your blogging industry.

Content, the textual presentation is believed to be in the core of success in a blog. Huge amount of contents are being created and published everyday throughout internet. So, If your content doesn’t overcome the status of ordinariness, none would find or read your content and consequently, you won’t earn no benefits.

But what are the reasons for you to consider the contents in the focus of your blogging efforts? Mainly your efforts should center round the following factors while creating contents-

• Giving answer to the complicated questions.
• Giving answer to the questions users are actually searching for.
• Attracts and engage readers to read more contents in your site
• Improve ranking in Search Engine.
• Represent your brand
• Induce sharing and consequently new traffic

To grasp all these benefits, you should follow the following writing guidelines-

• Content should be unique at least in sense of Search Engines.
• It needs to be Search engine optimized
• should be informative, logical, statistical, visual, entertaining and smoothly-readable and easily-understandable.
• should be written targeting a specific group of readers
• visually-appealing structured.
• briefly-described but large in volume.
• Free form grammatical mistakes and all-out errors.
• Language should be modern, lively, spicy, colorful and idiomatic where necessary.

To ensure overall security of your WordPress site, you can take attempts for protecting your site as well as reducing threats of infections from four different layers stated below-

• Install Backup system
• Use security plugin
• Use Web Application Firewall
• Move your domain from http to https

Now let’s go detailing one by one-

Backup System

While the site’s security question arises, first comes the Backup.

A responsible WordPresser should attempt to Backup site/blog at the very initial stage just after posting starts. It is an essential security measure you should take preferentially. Backup is not only to ensure future protection of a site but to store up the everyday work so that you can restore it anytime in case of any data-loss. It is not wise to invite a great hazard to a site leaving Backup step behind due to negligence. So, backup should come first.

But How, Where and what to Backup– is a timely question at this stage.

However you can backup manually or rely on plugin-base backup. You have also option to choose from free and paid backup in the case of backup with plugin.

However whatever backup strategy you adopt, you should ensure multi-layered backup of your site without relying on only a specific one.

In this context, we’ve a number of exclusive inclusive backup resources for WordPress or any other-sites that might, we think, fulfill the necessity of your Backup guidelines.

Just follow–

Security Plugin

Above Backup, you might use a security plugin like Sucuri Scanner. This Plugin is essential for monitoring your site’s threat-related activities and malware scanning.

Web Application Firewall

You can use different Web application firewall plugins to protect your site from malicious traffic flow. One of such Firewall protection system is Cloudflare.

http to https

You usually a Domain name starts with http which means Hypertext Transfer protocol. This is the Protocol part of Domain which is a typical web transfer protocol and not secured. But there is a much secured and encrypted version of http which is https meaning Hypertext Transfer protocol Secure.

Many a hosting provider offers it free for a definite level of security. Alternatively, you can purchase an https protocol from different provider companies. For details of HTTP and HTTPS, follow this tutorial-

Actually HTTPS is the combination of HTTP and SSL (Secure Socket Layer). It helps to transfer your website data between web-server and web-browser encrypted way ensuring high-level security.

You cannot think of driving your site without keeping an eye on the Stats Radar. Especially when traffic movement is usual (whatever the number be) on your site, it is essential to bring it under regular observation. Essential information like number of traffic, their location, total pageviews, traffic sources, bounce-rate, visitors trends and behavior are the most significant indicators of your site’s performance. It is the perfect traffic stats that can make you drive your site on the right track.

But how to collect genuine traffic stats?

There are many stats analysis WordPress plugins you can choose from. WP Statistics, Google Analytics, WP Power Stats, Jetpack by WordPress are some of them.

All aren’t unconditionally free. Among them Google Analytics is the best in all sense. I don’t know the name of such any tool that are free and equipped with varied advanced features other than Google Analytics.

To learn how to set up Google Analytics account and connect your WordPress site with GA to make it Report-trackable, read out the following tutorials-

Do you think a user will wait for 5 to 10 seconds for your webpage to load? Your answer might be Yes or No.

You’re weaving your website by word and sentence sitting before computer that looks impressive on your device. But have you ever thought how a page of your site appears to a mobile user living thousand miles away?

Here comes the fact ‘User Experience’. There are a number of factors for which webpages are not loaded to different users same way and with same appearance and occurrence. This experience varies from user to user device-wise, browser-wise and even on the basis of website layout.

So you must take the matter User Experience into account and invest efforts and attention to provide a pleasant and tolerable user-experience about your site to the visitors.

Now a timely-question is: what is the impact of user-experience of a site?

Odd-looking, clumsy, annoying and time-consuming user-experience result in early or instant exit of the visitors from your site leaving an increase in Bounce rate. And both Bounce rate and Page loading time is the strong ranking factors in Google Search.

According to Kissmetrics, a top-ranked web analytics tool-

47 percent of visitors expect a website to load in less than 2 seconds, and 40 percent of visitors will leave the website if the loading process takes more than 3 seconds.

However, let’s see at a glance what are the factors that influence the user-experience negatively or positively-

• Site speed or page loading time
• Broken link
• Site Layout and Design
• Navigation network
• Content quality
• Image setting
• Page error 404 and others
• Device specificity
• Browser specificity
• Resposiveness

So, it is you who have to take timely and proper initiatives to fix these problems or at least keep the parameters to a tolerable limit.

For years, I was happy finding a Synonym and Antonym online dictionary from which I could collect and use similar word while writing post. But when I came across Grammarly, I found that my happiness was based on foolishness. This is because Grammarly, a grammar checker and synonym tool, helped me faster way in this case.

If Grammarly is installed in your browser, it poses auto-suggestion for grammar checking and inserting probable synonym during post composition. You just choose a word from suggestion and click; the system will insert it in desired place.

There are numerous tools and plugins for WrodPress site available that can make your blogging efforts unimaginably shorter, faster and easier. May be you spent an hour or two to perform a definite task which could be done by several clicking if the definitive tool were used.

Here are instances of essential Tools and Plugins. Some tools and plugins are open-source and some are paid. Again among the tools, some are available for online service and some are found as desktop app that can be downloaded.

Plugins

• Yoast: SEO analysis and controlling tool; can be used for Search Engine submission.
• Visual CSS Style Editor: Original name Yellow Pencil. This is a visual CSS editor for the non-techy WordPress users. This can be used to change CSS of your WordPress site all at global and individual level.
• Updraftplus: For Backup and restoration of WordPress site.
• Ad Inserter: To insert and manage all kinds of add including Google Adsense from WordPress dashboard.
• List Category Posts: For listing posts of single or multiple categories within WordPress posts.
• Yoast Duplicate Posts: For cloning WordPress post.
• Smush: For reducing image size.
• Sucuri:WordPress security plugin; can be used to secure WordPress site from malware and other threats.

And many others.

Tools other than plugins

• Windows Live Writer: This is used to write, edit and publish WordPress post on offline environment.
• Grammarly: To check and correct Grammar along with Synonym suggestion feature.
• Different Converters: This includes tools for conversion of pdf to image, text to pdf, pdf to text, video to audio, html to text etc.
• Email checker: To check-up whether an email is authentic or not.
• Embed Google Photos: To generate an embedding code for Google Photos to embed in WordPress or any site.
• Fotojet: Online tool to create thumbnail.

And many others.

Trustworthiness is an asset that you build up gradually with the step-by-step development of your blog. This is due to the definite faiths in visitors’ mind that compel them to enter your site repeatedly as The Returning Visitors.

In a word, what invisible invaluable credits you earn through visible efforts is TRUST. As it is necessary to employ energy, time, attention and value to earn trustworthiness; so it is essential to remain active not to lose it. Now question-

QUESTION: How can I be trustworthy to the visitors?

ANSWER: Simply, by not being untrustworthy to them.

QUESTION: What things can make me untrustworthy?

ANSWER: If you fail to act as you promised/committed or break your word, you will turn untrustworthy to them.

QUESTION: But when and what did I promise about? As far as I know I didn’t make any commitment to the readers/visitors.

ANSWER: Of course, you did. You have a niche that you frequently advertise, you have a brand name you like mention repeatedly, you fixed purposes and aims of blogging that you describes in post, You fix title of the posts, you pose suggestions and recommendation every now and then. All these things, whether you are aware of or not, make you committed to the prospective readers.

QUESTION: Really important! But could you tell me specifically what the important factors are to focus on in order to avoid risk of getting untrustworthy to visitors?

ANSWER: Sure. Concentrate on the following factors roughly-

• Be truthful, don’t provide fraud information
• Avoid exaggerating the fact which is actually falsehood indirectly.
• Always keep updated. Backdated information expresses your indifference to readers.
• Be logical. If possible, Pose evidence/proof/data/statistics in support of your claim.
• Provide with the things exactly what you promised in the title
• Recommend/suggest any plugin/theme/tool/service only which proved beneficial after a long-term use by yourself.
• Don’t try to conceal but express your ignorance (if any) of a subject candidly.
• Represent yourself as exactly what you’re. Don’t pretend as if you were like someone great when you aren’t.
• Don’t copy others’ writing. If needed, take just the information and do personification.
• Don’t leave any important/download/contact link broken.
• If any wrong or misunderstanding occurs between you and readers; don’t miss it to apologize.

Hope you acquired an authentic and enjoyable guidelines for your WordPress site to upgrade it to professional level.

Do you find these topics important or do you think other important points left-out in your opinion. For any of your feelings or evaluation, drop a comment!