How To SEO Your Blog

Sep 11, 2007

Blog SEO is natural most of the time as by their nature itself blogs are easy to search engine optimize. Take for instance blogs created with WordPress; provided you are not using some really lousy theme that is full of images, JavaScript and skewed markup, WordPress generates blog posts that are mostly SEO-friendly. Still, there are some steps you can take to make sure your blog posts, for your chosen topics, rank higher than blog posts on similar topics from other blogs.

Steps to SEO your blog

Put your keywords in your title: Abstract titles sound cool but they make a dent in your rankings. Take for instance this post; I could have titled it something like “Get higher rankings for your blog” but since I’m dealing with blog SEO, I have used the phrase in the title. I’m not sure how well this post is going to rank (lots of factors are responsible for that) but using keywords in the title is a step in the right direction. But make sure the title compliments the subject of your blog as it’s of no use getting traffic for a wrong title.
Make the most important statement in the beginning: By taking the topic head on you get an opportunity to use your key expressions and keywords in the beginning without sounding spammy. If this post is about blog SEO, then I should better talk about blog SEO in the first paragraph and make my intentions clear why I’m writing this post.
Use your keywords in the anchor text: When search engines are crawling your blog post, with the help of your anchor text (text between <a> and </a>) they know you are linking to other resources on the same topic. For instance, if I want you to go to my content writing website I’d rather use go to my content writing website and instead of click here to go to my content writing website.
Use your keywords in the heading tags: Heading tags are very important as they highlight the main points of your blog post. Headings make your post scannable and search engines like them precisely for this reason. When you use your keywords in your headings it helps both the search engines and your human readers.
Have lots of relevant content: Regularly updated, relevant content helps you build a loyal readership and it gives the search engines lots of pages to index and rank. Remember that it’s not the number, but the quality that matter. Still, if you have lots of quality posts then the chances of being linked to and getting a higher rankings is greater. Less posts of course means limited choice for those who want to link to you, and inbound links definitely improve your search engine rankings.