SEO for Bloggers
Image: istockphoto.com/jpa1999
One of the biggest challenges bloggers face is getting their posts found in search engines. Royal Pingdom states that as of 2009 there were 126 million blogs (according to BlogPulse). With so many blogs on millions of topics, it’s important that every blog is effectively optimized to ensure they get found by interested readers. I have done some research and compiled a few ways to increase your blog’s ranking in search engines and keep your readers engaged in what you write about.
First, let’s discuss SEO. For those of you who don’t know, SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO is a way for websites to increase traffic when users search for terms that are related to a particular blog or website. For example, if a user searches Google for “help with SEO”, approximately 200,000,000 (yes, million!) results appear. Effective optimization will help you be as close to the top of the search engine results pages as possible. It’s important for your site to be optimized because most users find websites through search engines. People will not discover your site if you are not optimizing correctly; especially if your site covers a very popular topic.
As a blogger, there are a few things you should do to optimize the overall structure of your blog. One of the most important things you can do is show off some of the best posts you’ve written. If you have posts that received several comments or if you’ve noticed some of your posts have been read a lot, try highlighting those posts in a “Featured” or “Popular” section. This will not only allow you to show off your work to new visitors, but it will also add another link to those posts as well.
Along with highlighting the great posts you’ve written, you should always think of your industry when labeling your categories. For example, if you have a blog about cooking, you could use categories like Breakfast, Lunch, Snacks, Dinner, and Desserts. These relevant category titles tell the search engines that your blog is about cooking. Another tip to consider is keeping your categories and tags different. If you use a blog hosting platform like WordPress.com, for example, you are given the option of specifying specific keywords, or tags, to associate with your blog post. If you have Dinner as a category, don’t use that same word in your tags. Use something more specific to the post.
Something else to consider when developing your blog’s structure are your page titles. Always make sure the most important information pertaining to the page is before the less relevant information. If the name of your blog is in your title, that’s fine, just make sure it shows up after the main content of the page. So, it might look something like “Delicious Dinner Recipes, Sally’s Cooking Blog.”
Another important element to creating a blog that is friendly for search engines and for your readers is the obvious: developing great content. While you may be thinking “duh!”, there are so many blogs out there that don’t follow this rule. When writing your content, think about your reader. Write to them, not at them. When readers browse through blogs, they aren’t looking for corporate gobbledygook. Instead, they are looking for a human that can answer their questions, entertain them, provide insight, etc. Develop a tone for your blog that makes you sound authentic and that you truly are an expert on your topic.
Additionally, there are a few other content-related tips you should consider that will help you rank in search engines. Make sure that you use keywords throughout your post. While you don’t want to make every other word a keyword or phrase, you do want to spread them out enough for search engines to match them to your site. Just be sure to use keywords in your natural tone.
Once you’ve developed the tone for your blog and thought about ways to use keywords that are not overpowering to your readers, make sure to update your content often. Search engines (and readers) like blogs that are frequently updated with fresh content. If you don’t know what to write about, there are many services that provide you with great ideas. For example, you can receive Google News alerts that email you every time a specific word or phrase is mentioned in the news. Once you get your alert, you can begin writing about the topic immediately while it’s still current. Going back to the baking example, you can be emailed every time a new article about “baking” or “cooking” is mentioned in the news. Then you can filter out what is interesting and what is not. Other sites like Technorati.com and BlogPulse.com provide trends of topics that are being talked about most.
While text is the foundation to most blogs, it’s also important to incorporate other elements, like images and video, into your posts as well. Media can definitely attract the attention of those readers that don’t read your entire post. Even using charts and graphs can help provide a great visual to the reader.
When using media elements, always keep your reader’s Internet speeds in mind. Optimize your images and videos to download quickly, while still making them viewable. When you upload your media to WordPress.com or other blog platforms, you will be given different size options – it’s usually best to choose the smallest one to ensure it loads quickly on all computers.
Finally, a blog will not be fully optimized if it doesn’t take advantage of social media. Encourage your readers to share your posts on social sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Digg. Make sure that you have some sort of sharing mechanism that makes it simple for users to pass on the information to their followers.
Allow users to comment and join your conversation. Nothing is more advantageous to your blog than comments. It shows that your readers are intrigued by what you wrote, and search engines favor user-generated content. If you have readers that are commenting, they might want to get automatic updates when you have new posts as well. Consider adding a subscription feature where users can provide their email address and automatically be updated every time you have a new post. You can use a free service like FeedBurner, which is very simple to setup.
So there you have a few tips on how to optimize your blog effectively. Do I practice everything I just wrote about? Probably not. I am going to keep these newfound tips and techniques in mind though and begin optimizing my own blog as well.
Do you have any other suggestions? Share them below!
Special thanks to those sites that provided me with great insights into SEO for bloggers:
http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo
http://www.seomoz.org/article/the-professionals-guide-to-blogging#section%20V
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/21-tactics-to-increase-blog-traffic
http://www.seobook.com/bloggers
