In November 18, after a year’s break, I started blogging again on my own website. The break meant I had lost momentum and traffic to the site needed to be rebuilt. I did a complete clean down of my email list that I had not used in a year and I felt the state of play was rather disastrous.
When I restarted the weekly blogs, I used my traditional routes to get the post noticed, Facebook, Linkedin, Udemy, Email list, and my Google+ Community. Unfortunately in April Google+ closed down and leading up to this I was concerned about the traffic I would lose, as it did generate good traffic for me.
I was rather surprised by the increase in traffic when I started to blog again. Obviously sending an email list to a weekly post helps. But what I found was that it was older posts that started to gain more traction and have continued to gain traction. Some of my long tail keywords now rank in the top 5 on Google, which is rather amazing and seeing some posts rank 1 in Google search is, for me, a fantastic achievement.
I have been trying to figure out why and how I am doing so much better with Google search and Rankings. A 65% increase in organic traffic on the same period last year is rather good growth, don’t you think?
When it comes to SEO and Google rankings and all that kinda stuff, it was never my strong point. I didn’t change the content in the older posts that are now doing so well. Something must have happened when I started blogging again to make Google start paying attention to me.
Regular new content helps with SEO. Direct traffic, (which I get via my email list) helps with SEO and strong backlinks help.
And then it clicked. When I started blogging again, I did so using Steempress. That means the content shared on my own website is also shared here on the steem blockchain and on steemit.com. I was concerned when I started to do this as Google tends to penalize for duplicate content. Steempress does, however, have ways to overcome this. I have my options set so that only part of the post is shared on the blockchain with a link back to the full post on my website. I think it is these linkbacks that have pushed me up in Google.
You see linkbacks from a website as strong as Steemit.com are weighted way above linkbacks from other blogs. The Ahref Domain Rank for Steemit.com is 84. I only have linkbacks from two other domains with a higher ranking and they were in place before I even took the break.
Obviously, I have no way to prove this is the case and I wonder if there are other steempress bloggers that have experienced something similar? If others have experienced something similar, we should be using this as a key selling point to attract blogger to steempress.
Maybe you know about Google rankings and SEO and might be able to give me some insights???
Pinging some people that I think might know. 
