SEO Tips For Your Blog

NOTE: Though the objective here is to increase traffic (and sales) via greater search engine awareness, always remember to write for the end user first. So if it comes down to using one of the keywords or techniques to make the post SEO-friendly at the expense of losing common sense readability, elect for readability every time. Really, along with links, content is king – so don’t forget about churning out regular, original content.

#1) Try to make each new post at least 250 words. This seems to be the threshold that Google likes.

#2) Use your keywords in your posts. Do your keyword research and create a list of your top 25 keywords and use them correctly (keep reading) to make your blog SEO-friendly.

#3) But don’t get too friendly…. Don’t go crazy trying to stay within this strict range, but TRY to have no more than 2%-4% of your blog posting as these keywords though. More than that and you may run into the keyword-stuffing penalty and Google may not like that. It is definitely OK to be 8% on some posts and 1% on others though. Variation is your friend here.

To view the number of keywords in your post, compose your post in Word (or copy and paste into Word) and click the “Review” tab at the top. Then you should see a “Word Count” button. Clicking this will show the number of words in your post. You can then multiply that times .02 and .04 (2% and 4%) to give you the number of keywords you should be targeting.

For instance, if your blog post contains 400 words. 400 * .02 = 8 Keywords. 400 * .04 = 8 or 16 Keywords…so you would try to use (again, there is some leeway here) between 8-16 keywords in this posting.

#4) When it is appropriate and when you can do it, you will want to sometimes bold or italicize the keywords that you are using. This tells the search engine robots “Wait a second, here is something to focus on within this page” – and will result in a higher SEO ranking for the emphasized term. Again, remember the NOTE above and don’t go too crazy with the bolding or italics though.

#5) Use keywords in the title of your post and at the beginning and ending of your post, where possible. This has a similar effect as bolding and italics – it makes the engine bots take note of those particular words in relation to your page. It is very important that the last paragraph also contain one of your keywords since some search engine bots spider the beginning and the last bit of every blog post. Referring (yet again) to the above NOTE, don’t do this (especially with the title) every opportunity or your readers might wonder what the heck is going on – for instance, why you are starting EVERY post off with “Baseball”.

#6) Use your keywords fairly abundantly in the tags of your blog posts.

#7) Use your keywords in naming your images if you can, using hypens between each word. For instance, instead of “baberuth.jpg”, name the image “baseball-great-babe-ruth.jpg”.

#8) Use your keywords in the “ALT” tags (or naming tags) of your images, where possible.

#9) Linkbuilding – This is not anything you can do within the blog posting itself, but it is uber-important. SEO-optimized blog posts will help a lot, but for true Google-power, you will need to build deep links that point to the blog itself.

This article was composed by the folks at Wafer Scale SEO who specialize in internet marketing seo and are providers of expert seo services.