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Guest post by Micah Klug of Home Faith Family.

Imagine you’re on your phone searching for the perfect cinnamon roll recipe.

You do a quick search on Google and click the link to the recipe you can almost taste.

Then…nothing.

A white screen.

You wait three, five, and then ten seconds.

Finally, the page loads but you have ads, sign-ups, and pop-ups thrown at you.

Are you still going to want to wait for this recipe?

Probably not.

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Are you trying to improve your SEO but you’re worried you have a lot of pages giving 404 errors on your site? Read this to learn the best way to check for broken links!

Guest post by Micah Klug of HomeFaithFamily.com.

A study recently conducted found that there are now over 500 million blogs across the world, and this number is increasing every year.

This number both excites and worries me.

I’m excited that there’s a variety of opinions, ideas, and opportunities for people to help each other while finding fulfillment in expressing their thoughts and sharing their expertise.

After all, you’re here because you have a blog and want to learn how to grow your business!

But it also worries me, because with that many blogs on the Internet, I know that many of them probably have inactive pages and broken links.

It’s really easy to have broken links on your site and not even know it. And the longer your site has been around, the more likely it is that you have broken links.

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Guest post by Micah Klug from HomeFaithFamily.com

When was the last time you used your phone for directions? If you’re anything like me, I’m guessing it was pretty recently!

Let’s say you pulled up directions to your local grocery story. Did you do a search for the exact address or for the store’s name?

Most likely, you searched for the store’s name. Why? Because even though you don’t know the exact address, you know where you want to go!

The organic traffic to your blog — also known as search traffic — works very similarly to this.

When people go to Google to search for an answer to their question, they might not input your exact blogging URL, but they will search for specific keywords that end up sending them to your blog! That’s because people are searching for answers to their questions using specific keywords.

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Guest post by Micah Klug from HomeFaithFamily.com

About six months into starting my blog, I had one of those unforgettable blogging moments where you can barely contain your excitement and it makes all of the work and effort invested into blogging so worth it!

I had woken up at 4 a.m. (which is when I currently get up in order to fit in time to blog!) and I decided I should check my Google Search Console and learn more about keywords.

I was so excited with what I discovered that I just couldn’t help myself… I woke my husband up and exclaimed, “Oh, my goodness, Travis, one of my blog posts is ranking in the first spot on Google!”

(Thankfully, my husband forgave me for my display of enthusiastic excitement, and I promised that I wouldn’t wake him that early in the morning again!)

How did I manage to have a blog post rank in the first spot on a Google search? Well, I could talk about searching for your perfect keywords, strategies to rank on Google, and tools you can use to help you craft your next perfect blog post, but before I do that, we first need to talk about what search engine optimization (SEO) is and why you should care about is as a blogger.

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