Simple SEO Tips for Bloggers

A lot of my clients know that blogging about their products and services is an important part of marketing in today's social media crazed cyber world. Yet, they are not quite sure how it will help them with their search rankings. Regardless of what platform you use (Blogger, Drupal, WordPress, etc.) make sure you follow these best practices for blogging as they will assist with your SEO efforts.

* Identify a few targeted keywords that you want to be ranked and found by the search engines. These keywords will need to be the most common words used in your blog post and make sure they are in the title, URL, used in outbound links and are bolded.

*Change your permalink (i.e. permanent URL) structure to show the title of your blog post rather than the default URL (ex. "yourblog.com/?p=123"). This will make it easy for search engine spiders to find and crawl blog content.

* Write the title of your blog as a headline in order to grab the reader's attention but also include targeted keywords because your blog will get archived and your titles can become searchable.

* Categorize your content so it allows the aggregation of content according to themes, thus making it easier for search engines to understand your content and giving you a better chance of ranking well on particular topics.

* Keep the content fresh in order to keep the readers and search engines coming back. From a search engine perspective, if your blog is updated frequently, it will attract the attention of spiders and causes more crawling and faster indexing, thus allowing your new content to become searchable more quickly.

* Create internal links by deep linking anchor text to product and/or information pages on interior pages of the site.

* Encourage interaction through comments. This will help create a more active community, which will translate in more content, traffic and eventually higher rankings.

Getting the Most Out of Keywords

Targeting the right keywords is arguably the most important part of any SEO methodology. What to do with or, better yet, how to optimize for those keywords is "1B" in terms of importance. Below are helpful recommendations to consider when optimizing for your targeted keywords.

1. Forget about and remove long keyword lists and/or "stuffed" keywords from your web pages. Search engines consider keyword stuffing spam. Meta keyword tags with dozens of keywords will not work either. Search engines do not consider this meta tag in ranking calculations and it's never seen by visitors or searchers.
   


2. Optimize a web page for 1-2 keywords or keyword phrases so that you build more relevancy between the copy and the keyword versus many keywords assigned to one page. It is much easier to get high rankings if the web page is very relevant to the searched keyword.
   


3. If you have multiple-pages targeting the same keywords, avoid cannibalization by placing links on all the secondary pages back to the page you most want ranking for the term/phrase using the primary keywords as the anchor text of those links.


4. Add keyword modifiers and combine keyword variations in one sentence. For example, an optimized web page title for a San Francisco shoe store could read: Buy cool Puma sneakers in our sneakers shop in San Francisco.
   


5. Don't be afraid to use your targeted keywords in the URLs of your web pages. Search engines do look at keyword-targeted domains. But don't obsess with the order of the words or go overboard by using too many keywords in the same URL.