How To SEO Blog Posts
Just as it is important to SEO your complete blog, it’s also important to SEO your blog posts because your individual blog posts collectively improve the search engine rankings of your entire blog. No matter how much time you spend on your blog SEO, unless you SEO your individual blog posts, you are hardly going to get any SEO advantage. So here’s how you can SEO your blog posts:
Write compelling blog post titles
Half of your SEO battle is won when you create good blog post titles. Put your main expression in your blog post title. Try to use your keywords or your key phrase in the blog post title as search engines use the text of your page title to rank it. Your blog post title tells the search engines what your blog post contains. A few months ago I wrote a blog post titled 8 Ways of Creating Compelling Blog Post Titles that gives you a few hints on creating great, SEO friendly blog post titles.
Generate SEO friendly URLs
Your URL too should contain your primary keywords in it. If your blog post URLs are appearing something like http://www.yourblog.com/index.php?p=433 then you are not generating SEO friendly URLs and you are missing out big on this. In case you are publishing your blog using WordPress you can change the settings to have search engine friendly URLs. I have explained the procedure in my blog post How To SEO Your WordPress Blog.
Mention your important points in the beginning
The search engine crawlers don’t normally read your entire blog post. They just skim over it, or read the first 250-350 words. So mention your important stuff in the first and second paragraphs. This gives you an opportunity to use your keywords or key expressions quickly.
Use headings and sub-headings to organize your text
Headings and sub-headings make your blog post content scannable and they present a complete picture of what you are trying to say, both to your human readers and the search engine crawlers. Organize your blog post content under headings and sub-headings and try using your keywords there.
Highlight your keywords and use them with bulleted lists
Highlight your keywords or key expression but don’t overdo it. Once or twice is fine. Similarly, try to present your thoughts in bullet format and use your keywords there. The search engine crawlers pay more attention to words appearing highlighted and within the lists.
Link to other posts from your blog
Whenever you get a chance link to your older posts from your newer posts and use the relevant keywords as the anchor text of the hyperlinks. This increases your link juice and increases the relevancy of the blog posts being linked to.
Use ALT tags with images
If you use images in your blog posts then don’t forget to use the ALT attribute of the <IMG tag and the ALT text should explain what the image depicts. Try to use your keywords in the ALT tag, and this in turn, forces you to use only relevant images.
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October 9th, 2007 at 1:11 pm
Are you sure spiders just skim over content?
October 9th, 2007 at 3:12 pm
Thanks for the good post. After all the debate on the paid links penalty issues around I would also mention one thing about being careful with your paid links by using the rel=nofollow if appropriate etc.
I always enjoy reading posts on how to improve your posts. For some reason I just can’t get enough of them, even if the content is something I know or have heard before. Thanks again.
October 10th, 2007 at 1:31 am
Hi aaron: Different people have different views but personally I’ve noticed the lower you go, the lesser is the focus. It is highly recommended that you use your important points in the beginning. Yes, they do skim the text and your headings help them skim it better
October 10th, 2007 at 1:33 am
Scott: I know what you mean by reading something that you’ve already read. Thanks for visiting the blog.