SEO your individual blog posts

Feb 19, 2008

Optimizing individual blog posts for your human readers as well as the search engines is as important as optimizing your entire blog. In fact it is much more beneficial, and easier to search engine optimize individual blog posts rather than focusing on the entire blog, and this reasserts the importance of sticking to the quintessential theme of your blog.

Many blogs become famous not for their overall content but for the amount of attention some of their posts get from all over the Internet. That’s why more emphasis is given to the quality of individual posts because any post can turn you into a blogging superstar. I am not an SEO expert but my experience tells me that if you stick to the following guidelines you can search engine optimize your individual blog posts. Please keep in mind that you rankings depend on lots of other factors.

Make your title straightforward, compelling, and use your primary keywords in the title

Some SEO and blogging experts insist that your blog post title is the most important component of your blog post but I slightly disagree because I think the most important component of your blog post is the content of your blog post. Have a great title and mediocre content and in just a few moments your title is declared bogus.

The title does two things: it gives your blog post a unique identity and it conveys to the readers and the search engines what your blog post contains. In that sense it is very important; whenever somebody links to your blog post or whenever your blog post appears in the search engines result pages it is your title that grabs the attention of the reader. This is why the search engines take your blog post title so seriously. The keywords in your blog post title tell the search engines what your blog post deals in and then they rank your blog post accordingly.

The blog post title attains greater significance in the case of social bookmarking websites like Digg and del.icio.us where it’s mostly your title that decides how many clicks you’re going to get from there. Websites like popurls.com display just your blog post title and you can only get clicks if your blog post title is enticing enough. Please don’t mix enticing with misleading.

Organize your blog post content under headings, subheadings and lists

Since there is so much stuff to be read, heard, and watched on the Internet, everybody is in a perpetual rush. So it helps your readers and the search engine crawlers if you organize your content under well-defined headings and subheadings. Using your headings and subheadings they can quickly browse through your content without having to read the individual paragraphs although your effort should involve making them read more and more.

Since it is easier to read headings and subheadings the search engines crawlers go through them to understand what you’re trying to convey. Use your main keywords and key expressions in your headings and subheadings because they are used while calculating your rankings.

Lists too are a great way of highlighting your keywords. Whenever you can, express your main ideas in the bulleted lists.

Use interlinking wherever possible

Interlinking means linking to other blog posts from within your latest blog posts. This can drive traffic — both human and search engines — to less popular blog posts. This also creates a network of links, facilitating easier crawling in the process. Make sure to use the relevant keywords as anchor text when you are interlinking because this way the search engines can make out what sort of information the page is being linked to contains. It then helps boost their ranking too.

Keep the most important part at the top

This is because the most important part contains your keywords. Since the search engine crawlers are anyway not going to read your entire blog post it is better to present to them your main point as soon as they enter the blog post. Make it as interesting as possible because your initial paragraph more often than not decides whether people are going to read further or not.

Highlight your keywords without overdoing

I don’t know how much it really works but many say it does. Highlighting means making your words and primary expressions appear in bold. Don’t highlight every occurrence.

Create great content

Although this point appears in the end it is one of the most important ways of search engine optimizing your blog posts. When the content of your blog post is superb your blog post gets linked by other bloggers and webmasters and this helps you boost your search engine rankings significantly. This is how linkbaiting has evolved; people specifically write blog posts or get them written by expert bloggers so that they are linked by the others.

One Response to “SEO your individual blog posts”

1. Ivan | JobsBlog.ie
   February 21st, 2008 at 8:54 am
   Trye, true, true!
   The individual posts give you the chance to optimise them for a speciffic keyword. Eash post, a new keyword, and a new high ranking.
   Ivan | www.JobsBlog.ie
   

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