Seven Blogger Basics to Improve SEO
Posted: November 16, 2010
With new bloggers posting daily, how can you improve the odds of your blog getting found? If you are new to blogging, you’ll want to consider these basics SEO tips to get started.
According to BlogPulse, more than 1,014,051 blog posts were indexed in the last 24 hours. With new bloggers posting daily, how can you improve the odds of your blog getting found? If you are new to blogging, you’ll want to consider these basics SEO tips to get started.
With seemingly hundreds of blogs dedicated the mastery of SEO, this blog post assumes you have already set up your blogging platform with the ideal infrastructure, such as a targeted domain, title tags, meta description, and meta tags. When you get ready to write your next blog post, keep these seven basics in mind.
1.) Define the target keyword for your post
Before starting any post, it’s important to have a target keyword or two in mind. This will guide many of the remaining SEO tips in the remainder of this post.
2.) Write a headline with a target keyword toward the beginning
While there are different strategies for writing headlines for retweets and click-throughs, SEO headline writing experts suggest including the target keyword as close to the headline start as possible.
3.) Use this keyword several times in first paragraph
In order to signal to Google what your target keyword is, it is important to work your keyword in the copy two or three times in the first paragraph. While many bloggers may write for SEO, your post still needs to be readable and comprehensible to your target visitors.
4.) Create an internal link in every post
One of the key takeaways from BlogWorld by Lee Odden of TopRank is to include an internal link in every post. According to TopRank: “Every link we add to our pages is like a ‘vote’ for this content to search engines. Every vote ranks us higher and puts us in front of more customers.”
5.) Target blog posts to a minimum of 300 words or more
While there is much debate about the ideal length of a blog post, Scribe SEO best practices indicate bloggers should target a minimum of 300 words.
6.) Shorten the URL
Most blogging platforms will take your blog title and convert to your permalink URL as the default setting. However, shortening the URL to the target keywords helps with SEO and also makes it easier to share as well.
7.) Craft a meta description
In every post you have the opportunity craft a custom subtitle that the search engines display to searchers. More importantly, this subtitle provides further opportunity to indicate to Google what the post is about providing more content for search engines.
Biz Tip Source: Talent Zoo
About the Author: Mike Merrill is director of marketing for ReachLocal and president of the Social Media Club of Dallas. Follow him on Twitter.