Blog SEO: How to use pagination to make money blogging

Blog SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is vital to for anyone looking to make money blogging. Without organic search traffic arising from quality content and great SEO, blogging can be a terrible drain on resources.

I am going to share a simple and effective SEO tip that has tripled my blog ad revenue and lowered my bounce rate by 15% in one go.

I'll also explain why pagination worked for me, and why it has additional SEO benefits that help to drive even more organic search traffic from Google.

If you're not familiar with basic to intermediate level SEO techniques for blogging then I recommend you read the following SEO articles for bloggers before continuing:

• What is SEO? Here's the ultimate small business SEO guide
• Small business SEO & Internet marketing strategy guide, 2012
• Five top SEO tips for small business bloggers
• How to make money blogging

Paginate content for effective blog SEO

Pagination (breaking up one large blog post into a series of shorter blog posts) has:

• tripled my blog ad revenue
• lowered the bounce rate by 15%

pretty much in the space of a week or two.

Ok, so its early days, and I'll update this post as more data comes in.

However, for very little work, paginating my content has so far provided the greatest ROI (Return on Investment) of any SEO activity I have undertaken (relative to the amount of time it took to implement).

How pagination works for SEO

Pagination worked to increase my ad revenue because it allowed me to expose readers to additional advertisements on each page refresh.

Every time a user reaches the end of one page within a blog post, they click the "Next page" link and a whole new page worth of ads displays. Instead of adding more ads per page (which is bad for SEO), I increase the chances of converting a visitor by getting them to view more pages instead. This helps to avoid any potential Google SEO penalty for having too many ads above the fold too.

In addition, paginating content helps to lower the bounce rate on my site because instead of reading an article and moving on, visitors have to view two or more pages to get all the content. I'll explain why this is hugely beneficial for SEO in just a moment...

If you think you need some pointers regarding Google's SEO penalties (in particular from the Panda and Penguin algorithm updates), and are interested in learning some more advanced SEO techniques for blogging, read the following articles:

• Google's Panda and Penguin updates are great for bloggers, marketers and business
• How to research SEO keywords: Five SEO tips from top SEO experts
• How to drive web traffic by outsourcing business blogging to a freelance blogger
• Small business SEO tutorial: How to attract higher quality Google traffic
• SEO Blogging tips: How to use Google analytics search data to inspire new content

How and when to use pagination for blog SEO

Pagination is only effective as an SEO tool if your blog posts are:

1. long enough
2. interesting

There is no point in writing a 300 word blog post and splitting it into 3 pages. Google wants to index valuable content, and it is highly suspicious of webpages and blog posts that have very little content.

In addition, writing "fluff" is no good either because people simply wont click "Next" to finish the blog post, so you don't get a page reload to display more advertising.