Technology

What is Blogging? A Complete Guide

October 16, 2024

This is one heavy question summed up in three words.

I will say it is a new form of journaling. You can get a domain and pen down all your thoughts, omit that, type your thoughts, and publish them for the world to read.

Yes, anyone and everyone can read it once it’s out there.

The difference between journaling and what is blogging is the viewership. While your good old diary was locked away in a drawer or secret hiding place – blogging is for everyone to see.

Hence, responsible blogging is appreciated.

A lot of my fellow writers have struggled to get their website up and running due to lack of roadmap. I am going to take everything one step at a time and explain how you can start blogging.

How Blogging Works?

For starters, you need a space. Pages are replaced with domain. You can use a free website or pay to get one. Once that property is yours, you may need to hire a web designer to crease out some nitty-gritty of behind-the-scene elements of the website.

Web devs call it backend development. If you aren’t too picky about how your website should look, many service providers have amazing themes that you can install and get started.

Not literally.

You need a hosting plan with certain hosting providers to have a space claimed and manage your website.

Here are some great Content Management Systems (CMS) for blogging websites:

WordPress
Wix
Blogger
Joomla
Drupal
Weebly
Medium
Squarespace
LinkedIn
Substack
Tumblr – if I don’t stop now, the list will go on and on. You get the jest?

Some of these websites also are available for free. Google and find out yourself, would you?

You only need to go to these sites, create an account, and start writing. I briefly had the Blogger and Substack account myself (these are free to use until you decide to monetize from it).

While it was fun and games, I got the kick from it; I started to see where some of the difference between free and premium stuff. Of course, with free account comes some limitations, and that icked me to get my own domain.

After you get a domain, you need to get a hosting plan. You may wonder why do I need hosting when I already have a domain.

Well, it’s like a dear diary moment.

Domain remains undiscovered until it exists on certain servers. Hosting service providers place your website on a server where your website goes live.

Now, the world can see it.

Here is a list of some hosting providers:

HostGator
GoDaddy
DreamHost
NameCheap
Hostinger
Cloudways
IONOS
Bluehost
A2 Hosting
Web.com

So, I had the worst experience with some of the hosting providers – can’t name and defame a business.

But yes, I can suggest that please do your due diligence, check reviews, and ask people in the community who own websites. They are the best people to get honest reviews because they have experience.

Themes & Plugins

Most CMS have themes and plugins for users in their Store. I have used WordPress and Shopify, so I can use these as examples.

These CMS have themes and plugins for Free and Premium use. Of course, there are certain limitations in the Free versions. I am using Newspaper theme, and in the last two years, I haven’t felt the need to switch to Premium.

It’s wise to use themes appropriate for your niche. Since I had the intention to publish blogs, Newspaper theme works for me. If you have an e-commerce store, Botiga, Kadence, and Astra are great themes.

Plugins are great for leveraging some elements into your website.

For my blogging site, I use Table of Content Plus and RankMath SEO. Other important plugins for every website are:

WP Rocket – for performance
Updraft Plus – for backing up the theme, content, and other data
tagDiv Social Counter – to integrate with socials
Perfmatters – for speed
Loginizer – for an added layer of security, locks the website after multiple logins and blocks the IP from accessing.
Advanced Google reCAPTCHA – save from spam and other forces

Disclaimer: There have been some instances when some sophisticated plugins became vulnerable after updates. An expert suggested to first research any vulnerabilities reported with new updates before you download the update or patch.

What Is Next? Niche!

After you have acquired a good hosting plan and the website has gone live, it’s all yours. You can whether start with no plan, but it is best to have a plan.

You need to figure out either you are going to monetize it or this will work like a portfolio.

If you are using it only to have a portfolio, then, of course, you can create, write, and upload as you wish. But if you plan to monetize, you would need a plan.

First, you need to decide on a niche. I don’t mean niche as photography website or blog for writers – you have to be more specific.

For instance, if it’s for photography, you must have a niche of your own. Whether you click still life, family portraits, or travels.

Why am I emphasizing on the niche?

There are 1.1 billion websites on the web, and some 200 million are active ones. Every day, some 252,000 websites go live.

How will you stand out in such a big pool?

Of course, when you carve your niche, you can stand out in big crowd with a micro niche.

Let’s understand this with numbers. Internet has over 600 million blogging websites. There are 4 million mom blogs. See the difference. Again, if you further go micro, pick a niche like teen mom blogger, the number will significantly reduce.

Or, maybe you can be more specific “mother of teen boy,” “mother of adhd boy,” “mother of fussy eaters,” “stem parenting,” “parent of preemies” or “single parents of boys.”

This also helps your website rank on SERP.

What is SERP?

SERP has intimidated new users with its complexity. Well, there is a lack of information about it. Search Engine Result Pages, fondly known as SERP, have love and hate relationship with websites.

Why, you may ask?

Because it’s always keeping web owners on their toes, you see, it happens due to other websites constantly working. Some days, a website working in a niche similar to yours would give more valuable content than yours.

As a result, you get kicked down.

Wait, I think I went two steps faster. Let’s retract.

When a user types a query on search engine, it shows the results based on many parameters. The parameters are the website’s relevance, DA, user response, quality content, backlinks, SEO, domain age, keyword density (KD), and domain name.

Google has some 200 factors listed on its website. I know that’s a bit too much for a beginner. But then I had to place an outbound link on my website for SEO – smart, ain’t I?

I am going to discuss the most important aspects so you can get started instead of getting scared and running away from the idea altogether.

What is KD?

KD or Keyword difficulty is the metric to identify how hard can it be to rank the keyword. It is measured in numbers. Some keywords, such as blogging, can have such high KD that you should just steer away from the topic.

You can then maybe use LSI keywords, questions, and other keywords with three to four words. For instance, I was talking to a friend, a very seasoned writer, who had a problem starting a website.

It was very disturbing to hear how come such an amazing writer, who has command over several intricate topics, cannot pull the courage to start their blog. Again, road map and intimidation are key factors.

I accessed Ahref (more on Ahref later) to analyze the keyword difficulty. It was too high.

Ahref itself is saying that you shouldn’t think about it. As you scroll down, I looked at the websites that already have blogs published with similar keywords.

Now, names like Wix, Blogger, HubSpot, and Neil Patel intimidate me.

Anyways, I intend to write about it anyway, and sometimes, heart takes over head, so I looked a little more. If you look at keyword ideas, you will find some suggestions.

I decided to check the keyword “what is blogging” and it’s KD.

Still not very promising.

But I was hell-bent and continued anyway. When you click on ‘View All’ in keyword ideas, it takes you to a detailed page of other ideas with the keyword.

As you focus on the list, you will find a list of keywords. Next is Intent, KD, and so on. Ahref itself is identifying the difficulty for you. Keywords under 30 will be green, which means easy to rank, yellow for medium difficulty, orange for hard, and red for very hard to rank.

I recommend to exploring Ahref, SEMrush, or Moz, whichever keyword researching tool you like, and figure out an easier keyword for your website.

Search Volume

Next to KD, you will see the block where search volume is listed. The beauty of search volume is you can select to view it as per the target country.

By default, USA is selected in Ahref. If your website is targeted for specific country, select the country to see how many people are searching the targeted keyword.

Why you want to check the search volume?

Well, sometimes, keywords can be a dud. With search volume of less than 1000, how can you base an entire website on such a keyword?

For a blog, we often write using such keywords (with low search volume) to cover the complete subject matter. Also, you never know when that keyword will spike and increase traffic to your website.

Next to search volume is traffic potential, which is very self-explanatory, followed by global search volume. It is also an important element to view because, oftentimes, your website, if it is a .com website, gets traffic from various Tier 1 countries.

Ahref, SEMrush, and Moz Pro

These are tools available online to analyze website’s rank, profile, keywords, outbound links, and SEO health.

Primarily, these tools are used in conducting website analysis and keyword research. Most experts prefer Ahref over other tools in terms of reliability and data accuracy.

Of course, it is a tool and at the end of the day, you would give it some margin of error.

Analyze the metrics: DR, Backlinks, Keywords, and Traffic.

DA in Moz is DR for Ahref. Both means the domains ranking on SERP. Higher the number, bigger fish you become.

DA, DR is Authority Score in SEMrush.

If you analyze these aspects, you will see small and significant differences. I have listed the images in terms of priority. I like to use Ahref for most of my keyword queries and website analysis.

If I want to be thorough, I go to Moz Pro. Just to be sure, because some days, these tools can be in a funky mood.

What is DA?

DA or Domain Authority is ranking of your website. It is evaluated in numbers. Higher the number, better visibility and authority.

What is SEO?

A lot of us already know about SEO. But for the sake of a complete guide, I will give a crisp and comprehensive overview.

SEO, Search Engine Optimization, is a way to increase the visibility of a website. In other words, beautify your website and content and make them “findable” for search engines like Google, Bing, YouTube, and DuckDuckGo. Yes, duckduckgo is a search engine and claims that it doesn’t track you. I would love to take them up on the offer someday.

Domain 101

What name you select does matter. I am not saying it has 100% impact, but it gives your website a good playing arena among the sea of all the giants.

Why would you miss an opportunity that brings you one step closer to your goal?

Crazies would argue the word Adidas has nothing to do with shoes and sports apparel. But do you have budget like Adidas to dispense on your website to hire sophisticated experts to maintain your website?

Exactly.

Since we, as beginners, would like to use every aspect to our benefit, I recommend using domain names that show clear intent.

If you are going to have a gadgets and tech reviews website, name should somehow signify that. PC Mag, Tech Radars are great examples. Then comes Tom’s Guide, another website for tech review.

Why does Tom’s Guide remain in the top ten in searches beside name with no intent?

Well, domain age is pretty significant. The older your domain age is, chances are, there is more content. And you have command over various topics on your website to beat the competitiors.

Then comes another important aspect, the TLD of domain.

TLD stands for top-level domain and signifies the final part of the domain. For instance, Wix.com. Here TLD is .com.

You may have guessed that the best TLD is .com. But in some cases, you may have options that would work way better. For example, .net, .org, .co, .uk, and .net.

Other TLDs which will not impact website ranking are .info, .online, .store, .site, and .me

Why would you use other TLD instead of .com?

Yes, I thought about that too. It happens. When you are hung on a name, like I was on Dwell, chances are you may not find the domain name in TLD because its already taken.

Otherwise, .com TLDs are often super expensive. When I looked up dwellhq.com – it cost somewhere around $540 USD per year. When I looked further, I found “.online” is available in $8 USD.

Do I need to explain more?

Backlinking and Internal Linking

These are two important aspects of SEO. Backlinking is placing a link that reaches your website from another website.

Usually, you need to pay such websites who provide the service of placing the link on their site in a blog.

My website is a guest posting site that purely has the intent for other websites to hire my service, and place a link in the blog (on my website), which, when clicked, leads to their website.

If you want to go into detail, here is the link to a website I paid to place my blog, with a weblink.

You don’t have to read the whole thing. Skip to the heading “Recap of season 5” until you reach the last line. Here, I have subtly inserted a link for “Young Sheldon” that leads to my website (also, inserted the link here because interlinking is crucial).

Then in the conclusion, you will find the line, “some news regarding season 6.” This is another link for my website. These are backlinks (an aspect of off-page SEO), and it has great impact on Domain Authority, aka DA.

Don’t close the Trending Celebrity tab yet.

In the last line of “Character Development,” the website has placed a link on “Dolph Lundgren.” As you click the link, a blog will open the on same website about Dolph Lundgren.

This is internal linking. Internal linking is an integral part of onpage SEO.

I think on-page SEO has a huge list and should be explained in great detail. I cannot just skim the whole great big section in passing.

You can now close the trending celebrity website. We are done.

On-page SEO Checklist

Keyword in H1, H2, and H3
Create a hierarchy in content segmenting in H1, H2, H3, and H4
Alt text for image with keyword
Keyword density managed in word count
Meta description – with keyword of course
Submit page on Google Console for indexing
Quality content
User experience
Table of content
Content length
LSI keywords in headings
Use infographics, charts, and tables
Unique content
Updating content regularly
Keyword in first 100 words of the content
Keyword in the conclusion
Mobile-friendly website
Use other multimedia – videos, GIFs, and images
Use of bullets and lists
Keyword should be in URL
Use at least one external link to authority website (not Wikipedia)
Use at least three interlinks
Have interesting things on start of content so the dwell time on the website.

Google Console

A service offered by Google to have a deep dive into content, keywords, intent, and visitors. Go to the website, sign up and verify your ownership.

Don’t skip on the guide like we skip policies and terms and conditions. Take time to read it to understand it.

After you have integrated the website with Google Search Console, it will take a month to collect data and start showing something. Don’t expect to see something from day one.

Console mainly shows you the results of organic traffic from the Google search engine.

When you explore the other tabs of the console, you will be able to identify the problems the website may be facing, such as speed, experience, and search potential.

In these tabs, users can explore Pages for content that is indexing or not. Furthermore, page experience and core web vitals are great aspects to gauge user experience.

Google Analytics

It is a great tool to collect insight into visitor behavior. If you are using social media and marketing campaigns, it will give you insight on how to drive your traffic better.

The search is classified into organic search, referrals, traffic from socials, and direct traffic. If you analyze the data collected over time, you can use the insight for better ROI.

Creating Clusters for Ranking

Google wants to asses you on your expertise. The new update EEAT which signifies Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

If you pick a topic, just like I picked about blogging, you must create similar content around it. The more you provide information, the more chances are that you will drive stable traffic due to the authority you have developed.

As you go on and on about certain topics and all other aspects, for instance, blogging includes detailed information on SEO, guest post blogging, informational blogging, and other topics that help make it a holistic guide for visitors.

Quality Content

The key is to create content that no one has created. Some writers pick a website with similar content and start paraphrasing it.

Google want you to write like a sixth grader, but ain’t no sixth grader.

You can’t fool the enterprise.

You have to give quality, uniqueness, and value. Your blog would rank for now, but when Google will find out there is similar content already available at SERP, you blog will gradually disappear.

I recommend picking something very unexplored and unique to write about, “That You Also Like.” In the pursuit, I start writing about a game for another website.

It was unique, it gained a lot of traffic but in long run, it started slumping because if lack of value and experience.

Now I write about movie reviews because I love them!

It’s a very competitive market; some websites like IMDB, Rotten Tomato, Roger Ebert, and Collider have “you cannot beat that DA.”

Just remember, write to give value. It shouldn’t be like the other page available on SERP, so keep updating.

Say No to Plagiarism and Paraphrasing

I already stressed enough about paraphrasing earlier. Research a lot to get command of the topic, and then set ablaze on papers.

Plagiarism is another problem that would taint your content and website. There are tons of free and paid tools you can use to check plagiarism.

Grammarly is the most commonly used tool. Yes, besides checking grammar, Grammarly also has a plagiarism checker. They also added an AI detector, which I find very conceited and troubled. Not recommended.

Here are some free tools:

since these are free tools, I suggest checking the content on at least two links. The word limit is 1000 words for free users, and you can check content ten times in a day.

Grammarly is a paid tool; you would need to buy a subscription. If you are a beginner and do not want to buy a subscription, you can use these free tools for some time.

Note: Don’t edit everything the tool says. You will end up with AI-sounding content.

Sir Hemingway is Supremacy

I love Hemingway Editor, and sometimes it is so exhausting.

I have taken the first two paragraphs for you to analyze. The reason we use the Hemingway app is to check readability scores. Look at the top right corner. My readability score is Grade 4, which is Good.

Why do we check the readability score?

Google wants the content to be simplified so a sixth grader can also understand. That means no or less flowery words.

Below the readability grade, you will find the guide telling you how much needs to be changed. It has highlighted my 7 sentences to be “hard to read,” 6 weakeners, and 1 with a simpler alternative.

For ease, the colors are indicators of the concern and will be highlighted in the content with the same color.

The minimum requirement is Grade 6, so I am going to let it be since it is grade 4.

What is Blogging ǀ Consideration Before You Go Live

I have tackled several important aspects of managing a website for blogging. But before you buy a domain, you need to do some research on your niche.

Check whether there are several websites on SERP with good DA already. If yes, you need to find a micro aspect of your niche.
Then, make a plan. Explore tools for keywords, and with those keywords, create a structure for how many blogs you will write to gain AUTHORITY on the subject matter.
Silo structure is a great way to divide content into various categories, and subcategories.
I recommend writing twenty blogs and keeping them ready before you buy the domain. Because once its live, you have the responsibility to publish content regularly.
Maintain a schedule in the calendar to be very punctual with posting.
Optimize content using the RankMath plugin.

Multimedia for Great SEO

Using image and video in content is a very important for onpage SEO. Try to keep adding images appropriately amidst the content to give a pleasant visual break.

If you find something relevant to your content on YouTube, you can also plug the link into the content.

When using RankMath for content SEO, RankMath reminds you to use these elements. As you add multimedia, RankMath will indicate that SEO is getting better for the blog.

When you upload the images in the content, it requires you to give an alt text in the management and uploading.

Usually, you will be uploading between three to four images in 1000 words blog for better SEO. In one image, try to use the exact keyword as an alt text.

Using CMS to upload a blog is whole another jargon which I plan to explain in detail later.

Note: Never use any image taken from Google search. Use the images you own or edit them on canva so they appear completely different. You can also use copyright free images.

Final Thoughts

I think I have listed down everything there is to know. Hope you find help and feel courageous to take the leap.

I will constantly update this blog in case I remember something. Save the link so you can refer to this roadmap of what is blogging and how you can start it today.