Today’s post is going to be a bit of a downer mostly because I felt like I needed to vent and this is the perfect place for it since it relates to SEO and blogging.

Do you know how frustrating SEO can be? I can’t even tell you the half of it lol 😭 because it’s so annoyingly painstaking and slow. But to give you some context, I am slowly upgrading my blogs on WordPress and my partner and I decided to start with our movie blog since this is a huge thing for us. We really want this blog to flourish so to do that we needed to make some huge changes (all of which are currently works in progress).

If you upgrade to the business plan on WordPress, it opens up your blog to so much more including expanding your blog into a website using plugins and having the freedom to use themes from anywhere. It can really give your “blog” a huge boost in terms of its usage, hits and clicks using SEO. One of the best SEO tools out there is Yoast (which I’ve known about for some time and I’ve used on other blogs) and while it might be one of the better plugins for SEO, it doesn’t come without its difficulties.

Be prepared for a lot of work and frustration

When you begin down the SEO road, you will come to realise just how challenging it can be getting all of your content up to SEO standard. There is a lot of work involved especially if you’ve never optimised your site for SEO before. And I am just grateful that our movie blog isn’t that old because if it was as old as this blog, I’d be optimising pages dating back to 2018 😫.

Despite this, I am purely focused on fixing anything that’s broken, updating ALT image text and optimising each post I write for SEO going forward using Yoast. It is a lot of work but once you start, you seriously will not be able to stop thinking about optimization in everything you do. And that’s a good thing!

However, last weekend I found that WordPress will automatically push your blog into maintenance mode called “staging” so you can work behind the scenes on updates. I didn’t know this so when I found my blog wouldn’t move out of the staging status, I panicked thinking I had broken it completely. I ended up getting help from the WordPress staff and the fix seemed pretty straightforward. I just wish I had known about that before I started because it would have saved me a lot of stress.

What do you have to do to improve SEO?

Quite a lot, actually. I’ve just run my site through an SEO analyzer which shows you all of the areas of your blog that are broken and need to be fixed. It shows you the pages that are currently ranking for SEO focus keywords which is really important if you want your content to be “seen” by Google and Bing’s search engines. And let’s face it, if you don’t have that right, how is anyone going to be able to find you amongst the billions of webpages that inhabit the internet? The short answer is that if you are not optimizing your content for SEO, you’re most likely not going to see as much traffic coming to your blogs as you could if you optimized it.

Check out Ryte because I am using the free version and it’s pretty life-changing 😅😊

So it’s important for your pages to rank so people can search for your content. And this is why I am working on this now while I have the time (two long weekends in a row) and can concentrate purely on this project. I’ll have further updates coming and if you’re interested in reading them, please stay tuned for more!

Please let me know in the comments if you have any questions as I am here to help where I can 🙂

Until next time friends and bloggers!

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