The word Blog is a short form of Web Log. But for years now, the word Blog has had an independent existence in the world of the internet. Almost everyone I know started their online presence with a personal blog. Those days Blogspot or Blogger was the go-to solution for blogs. It was easy to create blogs, write on them and share them with friends. It gave a sense of limitless pride and happiness. 

Then came WordPress, the world of blogging was reborn. While Blogger is still around and going strong, WordPress brought drastic changes to how people own and read blogs.

WordPress has its own pre-hosted solution that rivals Google Blogger.com in the form of Wordpress.com. But the self-hosted solution of WordPress which is available through wordpress.org is simply magic. The way it allows us to install, secure, optimise and use blogs is beyond words. That said, there are numerous other platforms like Ghost which are greatly applauded for their features. But how can we ignore WordPress when around half the internet as we know use it?

A lot of people believe that having a blog as a part of our website is going to improve the SEO of the website as a whole. Because adding regular content makes the blog a busy place, which in turn makes your website a busy place. And Google likes it when content is added regularly. 

The same things work reversely as well. If your website has some authority, that is definitely going to help the newly added blog. 

Google is mainly a customer-first service. And their primary customers are people who search on the internet. Google has always worked with webmasters on how to make the web page load faster. It is very important to ensure that our blog pages are loading fast enough even on the slower mobile internet connection. If not, there is a good chance that we will fall behind in Google search results. 

Invest in a good server, do not clutter your blog with heavy images (always optimise them), optimise the code, take the help of techniques like AMP etc to make page loading faster. 

Another important factor that affects blog SEO is the time spent by the visitors on the blog. If visitors tend to spend more time on your blog, Google tends to think that your website is more useful. This is not always correct, but it matters. The use of internal links and suggested links can improve the time spent by visitors on a website. 

This is an index of how quickly people left your blog. If visitors land on your blog and leave “ very “ quickly, Google tends to think that you somehow tricked the search results and have unworthy content. If the bounce rate is high, it is better to spend some time on the theme, colour scheme, layout, ad placement and the content itself so that the user experience is improved. 

Google is a mobile-first service for more than a year now. This is official and Google gives preference to mobile-ready pages. While software like WordPress is capable of generating a responsive layout by default, always make sure that your blog is mobile-ready and optimised for low-speed mobile connections.